From the first days of its existence, the railway became a source of increased danger. Trains hit people, collide with each other and derail. However, on the night of June 3-4, 1989, a train accident occurred near Ufa, the likes of which had no analogues in either Russian or world history. However, then the cause of the accident was not the actions of the railway workers, and not damage to the tracks, but something completely different, far from railway- an explosion of gas leaking from a nearby pipeline.
An object: 1710 kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway, section Asha - Ulu-Telyak, Kuibyshev Railway, 11 km from Asha station, Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. 900 meters from the Siberia-Ural-Volga region product pipeline (pipeline).
Victims: 575 people were killed (258 at the scene of the accident, 317 in hospitals), 623 people were injured. According to other sources, 645 people died
We know exactly what caused the train accident near Ufa on June 4, 1989 - a massive explosion of gas that leaked from the pipeline through a 1.7-meter-long crack and accumulated in the lowland along which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes. However, no one will say why the gas mixture flared up, and there is still debate about what led to the formation of a crack in the pipe and a gas leak.
As for the immediate cause of the explosion, the gas could have flared up from an accidental spark that slipped between the pantograph and the contact wire, or in any other component of the electric locomotives. But it is possible that the gas exploded from a cigarette (after all, there were many smokers on the train with 1284 passengers, and some of them could have gone out to smoke at one in the morning), but most experts are inclined to the “spark” version.
As for the reasons for gas leaks from the pipeline, everything is much more complicated. According to the official version, the pipeline was a “time bomb” - it was damaged by an excavator bucket during construction in October 1985, and under the influence of constant loads, a crack appeared at the damage site. According to this version, a crack in the pipeline opened just 40 minutes before the accident, and during this time quite a lot of gas accumulated in the lowland.
Since this version became official, the pipeline builders - several officials, foremen and workers (seven people in total) - were found guilty of the accident.
According to another version, the gas leak began much earlier - two to three weeks before the disaster. First, a microfistula appeared in the pipe - a small hole through which gas began to leak. Gradually the hole widened and grew into a long crack. The appearance of the fistula is probably caused by corrosion resulting from an electrochemical reaction under the influence of “stray currents” from the railway.
It is impossible not to note several other factors that are in one way or another connected with the occurrence emergency situation. First of all, standards were violated during the construction and operation of the pipeline. Initially, it was conceived as an oil pipeline with a diameter of 750 mm, but later, when the pipeline was actually built, it was repurposed as a product pipeline for transporting liquefied gas-gasoline mixture. This could not be done, since the operation of product pipelines with a diameter of over 400 mm is prohibited by all regulations. However, this was ignored.
According to experts, this terrible accident could have been avoided. A few days later, drivers of locomotives passing along this stretch reported increased gas pollution, but these messages were ignored. Also, on this section of the pipeline, a few hours before the accident, the gas pressure dropped, but the problem was solved simply by increasing the gas supply, which, as is now clear, only worsened the situation. As a result, no one found out about the leak, and soon there was an explosion.
It’s interesting that there is also a conspiracy theory about the causes of the disaster (where would we be without it!). Some “experts” claim that the explosion was nothing more than a sabotage by American intelligence services. And this was one of the accidents that was part of the secret American program for the collapse of the USSR. This version does not stand up to criticism, but it turned out to be very “tenacious” and today it has many supporters.
A lot of shortcomings, ignoring technical problems, bureaucracy and basic negligence - these are the true reasons for the train accident near Ufa on the night of June 3-4, 1989.
The chronicle of events can begin from the moment when the driver of one of the trains passing along the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section reported increased gas pollution, which, in his opinion, posed a danger. It was approximately ten o'clock in the evening local time. However, the message was either ignored by dispatchers, or simply did not have time to reach the responsible officials.
IN 1:14 local time, two trains met in a lowland filled with a “gas lake” and an explosion occurred. It was not just an explosion, but a volumetric explosion, which, as is known, is the most destructive type of chemical explosion. The gas ignited immediately in its entire volume, and in this fireball the temperature momentarily rose to 1000 degrees, and the length of the flame front reached almost 2 kilometers.
The disaster occurred in the taiga, far from large settlements and roads, so help could not come quickly. The first to come to the scene of the accident were the residents of the village of Asha, located 11 km away, the residents of Asha, and subsequently played a big role in rescuing the victims - they looked after the sick and generally provided all possible assistance.
A few hours later, rescuers began to arrive at the scene of the disaster - the first to begin work were the soldiers of the civil defense battalion, and then the rescue train crews joined them. The military evacuated the victims, cleared away the rubble, and restored the tracks. The work went quickly (fortunately, in early June the nights are light and dawn comes early), and by morning the only evidence of the accident was the scorched forest within a kilometer radius and scattered carriages. All the victims were taken to Ufa hospitals, and the remains of the victims were removed during the day on June 4, and transported by car to Ufa morgues.
The work to restore the tracks (after all, this is the Trans-Siberian Railway, stopping it for a long time is fraught with the most serious problems) was completed in a few days. But for many more days and weeks, doctors fought for the lives of seriously wounded people, and relatives with tears in their eyes tried to identify their relatives and friends in the burned fragments of the bodies...
According to various estimates, the force of the explosion ranged from 250 - 300 (official version) to 12,000 tons of TNT equivalent (recall that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a power of 16 kilotons).
The glow of this monstrous explosion was visible at a distance of up to 100 km; the shock wave broke glass in many houses in the village of Asha at a distance of 11 km. The explosion destroyed about 350 meters of railway tracks and 3 km of the contact network (30 supports were destroyed and overturned), about 17 km were damaged air lines communications.
Two locomotives and 37 cars were damaged, 11 cars were thrown off the tracks. Almost all the carriages were burned out, many of them were crushed, some of the carriages were missing their roofs and trim. And several carriages were bent like bananas - it is difficult to imagine how powerful the explosion was to throw multi-ton carriages off the road in an instant and thus cripple them.
The explosion started a fire that engulfed an area of over 250 hectares.
The ill-fated pipeline was also damaged. The decision was made not to restore it, and it was soon liquidated.
The explosion killed 575 human lives, of which 181 were children. Another 623 people were seriously injured and remained disabled in various categories. 258 people died on the spot, but no one dares to claim that these are exact numbers: people were literally torn apart by the explosion, their bodies mixed with earth and twisted metal, and most of the discovered remains were not bodies, but only mutilated fragments of bodies. And no one knows how many dead remained under the hastily restored railway track.
Another 317 people died in hospitals in the days following the accident. Many people suffered burns over 100% of the body, fractures and other injuries (including traumatic amputation of limbs), and therefore simply had no chance of survival.
Today, in the place where 24 years ago there was a monstrous explosion, there is taiga and silence, broken by passing freight and passenger trains. However, electric trains traveling from Ufa to Asha do not just pass by - they certainly stop at the “1710th kilometer” platform, built here a few years after the disaster.
In 1992, a memorial was erected next to the platform in memory of the victims of the disaster. At the foot of this eight-meter-tall monument you can see several road signs that were torn off the carriages during the explosion.
One of the causes of the disaster was a violation of operating standards for product pipelines - there were no leakage monitoring sensors on the pipe, and no visual inspection was carried out by linemen. But something else was more dangerous: along its length the pipeline had 14 dangerous approaches (less than 1 kilometer) and intersections with railway and highways. The problematic pipeline was dismantled, but the problem was not solved - tens of thousands of kilometers of pipelines were laid in the country, and it is impossible to keep track of every meter of these pipes.
However, real steps to prevent similar disasters in the future were made 15 years after the accident: in 2004, on the instructions of OJSC Gazprom, a system for monitoring the crossings of main pipelines across roads (SKP 21) was developed, which has been implemented on the roads since 2005. pipelines of Russia.
And now we can only hope that modern automation will prevent a catastrophe like the Ufa one from happening again.
When two trains - “Novosibirsk-Adler" and "Adler-Novosibirsk" - were passing nearby, the gas that had accumulated in the lowland exploded. According to official data, 575 people were killed. A quarter of a century later, eyewitnesses of the tragedy remember this day.
MET YOUR FUTURE WIFE IN THE HOSPITAL
Sergei Vasiliev was 18 in 1989. He worked as an assistant driver of the Novosibirsk-Adler train. After the events near Ulu-Telyaq he was awarded the Order “For Personal Courage”:
In three days I had to go to the army. Perhaps I would have been sent to Afghanistan. At least that's what I thought. There was no foreboding of trouble that day. We rested in Ust-Katav, hitched the train and returned home. The only thing I noticed was the bad fog that was spreading across the ground.
After the explosion, I woke up on the floor, and everything was burning there. The driver was pinned in the cab. I started to pull him out, and he was a healthy, heavy man. As I later found out, he died in the hospital on the sixth day. As soon as I pulled it out, I saw that the door was blocked by bars - I somehow managed to get it out.
We got out. I thought my driver wouldn’t be able to get up - he was all burned, he could barely move... But he got up and walked away! State of shock. I had 80% burns, all that was left on my body were shoulder straps, a belt and sneakers without soles.
In one of the carriages, a grandmother and five grandchildren were going to the sea to relax. She hits the window, she can’t break it - double. I helped her, broke the glass with a stone, she gave me three grandchildren. Three survived, and two died there... My grandmother also remained alive, she later found me in the hospital in Sverdlovsk.
The first thing I thought then was that the war had begun, that it was a bombing. When I found out that the cause of the explosion was someone’s negligence, I was so angry... It hasn’t let me go for 25 years. I spent almost three months in the hospital, where they pieced me together again, piece by piece. It was in the hospital that he met his future wife. Then he tried to work again as an assistant driver. I was able to endure it for a year: as soon as the train approached this place, my blood pressure immediately jumped. I couldn't. He transferred and became an inspector. That's how I still work.
“A PILE OF ASH, AND IN THE MIDDLE IS A TIE CLIP. THERE WAS A SOLDIER"
The district police officer of the Krasny Voskhod village, Anatoly Bezrukov, was 25. He saved seven people from burning cars and helped take the victims to hospitals.
First there was one explosion, then a second. If there is a hell, then it was there: you climb out of the darkness onto this embankment, there is a fire in front of you and people are crawling out of it. I saw a man burning with a blue flame, the skin hanging on his body in rags, a woman on a branch with her stomach ripped open. And the next day I went to the site for work and began collecting material evidence. Here lies the ashes, all that is left of the man, and in the middle a tie pin shines - that means there was a soldier. I wasn't even afraid. No one could be more afraid than those who traveled on these trains. There was a smell of burning there for a very long time...
“A LOT OF PEOPLE – AND EVERYONE IS ASKING FOR HELP”
Krasny Voskhod resident Marat Yusupov is now 56 years old. On the day of the disaster, Marat saved four people from the carriage and loaded the cars with “severe” victims.
There was no forest left at all around these trains, but it was dense. All the trees fell down, just black stumps. The earth was scorched to the ground. I remember many, many people, everyone asking for help, complaining about the cold, although it was warm outside. They took off all their clothes and gave them to them. I was the first to carry a little girl, I don’t know if she’s alive...
RED GAZERBOARDS AT THE SITE OF BURNED CARS
Sergey Kosmatkov, head of the Krasny Voskhod village council:
Everyone says that there were 575 dead, in fact - 651. They just couldn’t identify them, only ashes and bones remained. Two days after the fire, workers came to lay new rails directly on the remains. People then stood up like a wall, collected everything in bags and buried it right next to the tracks. And three years later we erected an obelisk here. It symbolizes two melted rails and at the same time a female profile. There are also bright red gazebos near the road. They were installed in places where completely burnt cars lay. Relatives gather there and remember.
HOW IT WAS
Important facts about the disaster
✔ On the night of June 4, 1989, at the 1710th kilometer of the Asha-Ulu-Telyak section, almost on the border with the Chelyabinsk region, two trains met: Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk. The explosion occurred at 01.14 - multi-ton carriages were scattered through the forest like splinters. Of the 37 cars, seven burned completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 were torn off and thrown off the tracks.
✔ This meeting should not have happened. But one train was late due to technical problems, and a woman who began to give birth was disembarked from the second.
✔ According to official data, there were 1,284 people on two trains, but in those years names were not written on tickets, “hares” easily infiltrated, children under five years old traveled without tickets at all. Therefore, there were most likely more people. The lists of the dead often contain the same names - families were traveling on vacation and back.
✔ There was a gas pipeline at a distance of a kilometer from the railway; it was built four years before the tragedy. And, as it turned out during the investigation, with violations. The gas pipeline ran through a lowland, among the forest, and the railway runs along a high embankment. A crack appeared in the pipe, gas gradually began to accumulate in the valley and creep towards the trains. What served as the detonator is still unknown. Most likely, an accidentally thrown cigarette butt from the vestibule or a spark from under the wheels.
✔ By the way, a year before this incident, there had already been an explosion on this pipe. Several workers died then. But no measures were taken. For the death of 575 people, the “switchmen” - the workers who serviced the site - were punished. They were given two years in prison.
In June 1989, the largest train accident occurred. Two trains collided on the Ufa-Chelyabinsk section. As a result, 575 people were killed (181 of them children) and another 600 people were injured.
At approximately 00:30 am local time, a powerful explosion was heard near the village of Ulu-Telyak - and a column of fire rose 1.5-2 kilometers upward. The glow was visible 100 kilometers away. IN village houses glass flew out of the windows. The blast wave felled the impenetrable taiga along the railway at a distance of three kilometers. Hundred-year-old trees burned like big matches.
A day later, I flew in a helicopter over the scene of the disaster, and saw a huge black spot, like a napalm-scorched spot, more than a kilometer in diameter, in the center of which lay carriages twisted by the explosion.
... 
According to experts, the equivalent of the explosion was about 300 tons of TNT, and the power was comparable to the explosion in Hiroshima - 12 kilotons. At that moment, two passenger trains were passing there - “Novosibirsk-Adler” and “Adler-Novosibirsk”. All passengers traveling to Adler were already looking forward to a vacation on the Black Sea. Those who were returning from vacation were coming to meet them. The explosion destroyed 38 cars and two electric locomotives. The blast wave threw another 14 cars off the tracks downhill, “tying” 350 meters of tracks into knots.
... 
As eyewitnesses said, dozens of people thrown out of trains by the explosion rushed along the railway like living torches. Entire families died. The temperature was hellish - the victims still wore melted gold jewelry (and the melting point of gold is above 1000 degrees). In the fiery cauldron, people evaporated and turned into ashes. Subsequently, it was not possible to identify everyone; the dead were so burned that it was impossible to determine whether they were a man or a woman. Almost a third of the dead were buried unidentified.
In one of the carriages were young hockey players from Chelyabinsk “Traktor” (team born in 1973) - candidates for the USSR youth team. Ten guys went on vacation. Nine of them died. In another carriage there were 50 Chelyabinsk schoolchildren who were going to pick cherries in Moldova. The children were fast asleep when the explosion occurred, and only nine people remained unharmed. None of the teachers survived.
What actually happened at kilometer 1710? The Siberia - Ural - Volga gas pipeline ran near the railway. Gas flowed through a pipe with a diameter of 700 mm high pressure. A gas leak occurred from a rupture in the main (about two meters), which spilled onto the ground, filling two large hollows - from the adjacent forest to the railway. As it turned out, the gas leak began there a long time ago; the explosive mixture accumulated for almost a month. Local residents and drivers of passing trains spoke about this more than once - the smell of gas could be felt 8 kilometers away. One of the drivers of the “resort” train also reported the smell on the same day. These were his last words. According to the schedule, the trains were supposed to pass each other in another place, but the train heading to Adler was 7 minutes late. The driver had to stop at one of the stations, where the conductors handed over to the waiting doctors a woman who had gone into premature labor. And then one of the trains, descending into the lowland, slowed down, and sparks flew from under the wheels. So both trains flew into a deadly gas cloud, which exploded.
By some miracle, having overcome the impassability, two hours later 100 medical and nursing teams, 138 ambulances, three helicopters arrived at the scene of the tragedy, 14 ambulance teams, 42 ambulance squads worked, and then just trucks and dump trucks evacuated the injured passengers. They were brought “side by side” - alive, wounded, dead. There was no time to figure it out; they loaded it in pitch darkness and haste. First of all, those who could be saved were sent to hospitals.
People with 100% burns were left behind - by helping one such hopeless person, you could lose twenty people who had a chance to survive. Hospitals in Ufa and Asha, which took the main load, were overcrowded. American doctors who came to Ufa to help, seeing the patients of the Burn Center, stated: “no more than 40 percent will survive, these and these do not need to be treated at all.” Our doctors managed to save more than half of those who were already considered doomed.
The investigation into the causes of the disaster was conducted by the USSR Prosecutor's Office. It turned out that the pipeline was left virtually unattended. By this time, due to economy or negligence, pipeline overflights were canceled and the position of lineman was abolished. Nine people were eventually charged, with a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. After the trial, which took place on December 26, 1992, the case was sent for a new “investigation.” As a result, only two were convicted: two years with deportation outside of Ufa. The trial, which lasted 6 years, consisted of two hundred volumes of testimony from people involved in the construction of the gas pipeline. But it all ended with the punishment of the “switchmen”.
An eight-meter memorial was built near the site of the disaster. The names of 575 victims are engraved on the granite slab. Here, 327 urns with ashes rest. Pine trees have grown around the memorial for 28 years - in the place of the previous ones that died. The Bashkir branch of the Kuibyshev Railway built a new stopping point - “Platform 1710 kilometer”. All trains going from Ufa to Asha make a stop here. At the foot of the monument lie several route boards from the cars of the Adler - Novosibirsk train.
There is still debate about the cause of the explosion. Perhaps it was an accidental electrical spark. Or maybe someone’s cigarette acted as a detonator, because one of the passengers could well have gone out at night to smoke...
But how did the gas leak occur? According to the official version, during construction in October 1985, the pipeline was damaged by an excavator bucket. At first it was just corrosion, but over time a crack appeared due to constant stress. It opened only about 40 minutes before the accident, and by the time the trains passed through, a sufficient amount of gas had already accumulated in the lowland.
In any case, it was the pipeline builders who were found guilty of the accident. Seven people were held responsible, including officials, foremen and workers.
But there is another version, according to which the leak occurred two to three weeks before the disaster. Apparently, under the influence of “stray currents” from the railway, an electrochemical reaction began in the pipe, which led to corrosion. First, a small hole formed through which gas began to leak. Gradually it expanded into a crack.
By the way, drivers of trains passing this section reported about gas pollution several days before the accident. A few hours before, the pressure in the pipeline dropped, but the problem was solved simply - they increased the gas supply, which further aggravated the situation.
So, most likely, the main cause of the tragedy was elementary negligence, the usual Russian hope for “maybe”...
They did not restore the pipeline. It was subsequently liquidated. And at the site of the Ashinsky disaster in 1992, a memorial was erected. Every year, relatives of the victims come here to honor their memory.
Two train accidents, united by the date June 4th and separated by a period of one year. None of them received an explanation of the exact cause of what happened.
The first claimed the lives of 91 people, including 17 children. About 800 people were injured. 1,500 people were affected, 823 of them were left homeless. In the second, 575 people died (according to other sources, 645), 181 of them were children, and more than 600 were injured. What was it? We have collected probable versions in one article, possible reasons and eyewitness accounts. As usually happened in the USSR, the leadership did everything to keep silent, misrepresent and confuse people.
Arzamas railway accident
Almost three decades have passed since the Arzamas tragedy, when, according to the official version, a train with explosives exploded almost in the center of the city, killing about a hundred people, leaving thousands of citizens homeless. The people of Arzamas survived, the destruction was eliminated, roads and houses were restored. But from the memory of eyewitnesses of the tragedy you cannot erase a single moment of that summer day.
Saturday morning, June 4, 1988, did not foretell anything bad. It was just hot - the temperature went over 40 degrees. The freight train was crossing the crossing at a low speed - 22 kilometers per hour. And suddenly - a powerful explosion. Three carriages flew into the air, containing 120 tons of explosives, as newspapers wrote then, intended for geologists, miners and builders.
What caused the explosion has not yet been established. There were attempts to place the blame on the railway workers: they say that the explosion occurred on the rails, which means the transport workers are to blame. However experienced experts this has not been confirmed. There are other versions left. Including spontaneous combustion of explosives due to violation of loading rules, gas leakage from a gas pipeline laid under the railway tracks. By technical specifications The gas pipeline pipe should lie under the tracks at a depth of at least five meters, but it turned out to be laid at a depth of only one and a half meters.
Ivan Sklyarov (who later became governor) then, in 1988, was the chairman of the Arzamas city executive committee, and it was he who was responsible for eliminating the consequences of the explosion. He said that the tragedy is primarily related to politics. Those who eliminated the consequences of the disaster recall that there could have been much more victims then. This is evidenced by two facts. Firstly, a few minutes before the explosion, another train with ammunition left the station. Secondly, what everyone pays attention to is that there was an oil depot a kilometer from the crossing. If the explosion had occurred three minutes later, half the city would have been destroyed. This is how newspapers wrote about the tragedy in those days.
From the official: On June 4, 1988 at 9.32, when approaching the Arzamas-1 station of a freight train traveling from Dzerzhinsk to Kazakhstan, three cars with 18 tons of industrial explosives intended for mining enterprises in the south of the country exploded. The tragedy claimed the lives of 91 people, including 17 children. About 800 people were injured. 1,500 families were affected, 823 of them were left homeless. 250 meters of the railway track, the railway station and station buildings, and nearby residential buildings were destroyed. The gas pipeline running under the railroad bed was seriously damaged. Electrical substations are out of order high voltage line, distribution networks, water supply system. There were 160 industrial and economic facilities in the affected area. Two hospitals, 49 kindergartens, 69 shops, nine cultural facilities, 12 enterprises, five warehouses and bases, and 14 schools were damaged to varying degrees. The explosion destroyed and damaged 954 residential buildings, of which 180 were not recoverable.
Bang kids
At its epicenter they only worked strong people. On June 4, 1988, Arzamas resident Sasha Sukonkin was only two months old. He lost his father and mother overnight. They were left alone with their sister in the care of their grandmother, who worked as a postman. One thought never left the elderly woman: “If only I could raise my grandchildren, if only I could put them on their feet...” She raised, as they say, very good people, Sasha is studying at a university, his sister is also an independent person, she already has her own family, in which a small child is growing up.
Maria Afanasyevna Shershakova is happy for them. Now she is retired, but then, 20 years ago, as the head of the letters and complaints department of the city committee of the CPSU, she found herself in the very epicenter of human pain and grief. She connected the grandmother with her grandchildren. She hugged a fifteen-year-old girl, who kept repeating: “Please call the hospital, maybe dad is there...” And she didn’t dare tell her that she had to look for dad at the morgue; it was already known that he was riding in a car with other builders to the countryside Kid `s camp, definitely died. At that time, the girl’s mother was suffering from a heart attack, and her older brother had to be called from the army to identify her father... She helped the Yamov family, which had lost both adults and children, to reunite...
There were many people like Maria Afanasyevna in Arzamas at the tragic moment in its history. By coincidence, an explosion occurred in Arzamas in 1988. But from such man-made disasters We will probably never be insured. Moreover, with the increasing deterioration of the country’s technical fleet, and, to be honest, with our irresponsibility, the danger is only increasing. This means that we need to be reminded of the sad events in Russian history, although life still triumphs...
Train accident near Ufa
The largest railway accident in the history of Russia and the USSR occurred on June 4, 1989 in the Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, 11 km from the city of Asha (Chelyabinsk region) on the Asha - Ulu-Telyak stretch. At the moment of the oncoming passage of two passenger trains No. 211 "Novosibirsk - Adler" and No. 212 "Adler - Novosibirsk" a powerful explosion occurred. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), 181 of them were children, more than 600 were injured.
A train accident, the likes of which the world has never known, occurred in Bashkiria on the night of June 3-4, 1989. Fast trains No. 211 and No. 212 18 years ago should not have met at the ill-fated 1710th kilometer, where a gas leak occurred on the product pipeline. The train from Novosibirsk was late. Train No. 212 Adler - Novosibirsk was rushing towards us at full speed.
The official version goes like this. The weather was calm. The gas flowing from above filled the entire lowland. The driver of a freight train, which had passed the 1710th kilometer shortly before the explosion, reported via communication that there was heavy gas pollution in this place. They promised to figure it out...
On the Asha-Ulu-Telyak stretch near Zmeinaya Gorka, the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Everything around was filled with flames. The air itself became fire. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the intense burning zone. The tail cars of both trains were thrown off the track. The roof of the trailed “zero” car was torn off by the blast wave, and those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto an embankment.
The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time. The giant flash was seen tens of kilometers away. This is still a mystery terrible disaster worries astrologers, scientists, and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met at dangerous place, where did the product pipeline leak? Why did the spark occur? Why did the trains, which were the most crowded with people in the summer, end up in the inferno, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer away from the leak? The number of deaths is still not known for certain - in the carriages in Soviet times, when surnames were not put on tickets, there could have been a huge number of “hares” traveling to the blessed south and returning back.
“Flames shot up into the sky, it became as bright as day, we thought, we dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky Department of Internal Affairs, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. “We rushed to the fire in cars and tractors. Equipment on steep slope I couldn’t get up. They began to climb the slope - there were pine trees all around like burnt matches. Below we saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies... One woman was hanging on a birch tree with her stomach ripped open. An old man crawled along the slope from the fiery mess, coughing. How many years have passed, and he still stands before my eyes. Then I saw that the man was burning like gas with a blue flame.
At one o'clock in the morning, teenagers who were returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves, amid the hissing metal, helped along with the adults.
They tried to carry the children out first,” says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. “The adults were simply dragged away from the fire. And they moan, cry, and ask to be covered with something. What will you cover it with? They took off their clothes.
The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windfall and were searched for by moans and screams.
“They took a man by the hands, by the legs, and his skin remained in his hands...” said Ural driver Viktor Titlin, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. “All night, until the morning, they took the victims to the hospital in Asha.
The driver of the state farm bus, Marat Sharifullin, made three trips, and then began shouting: “I won’t go anymore, I’m bringing only corpses!” Along the way, children screamed and asked for something to drink, burnt skin stuck to the seats, and many did not survive the journey.
“The cars didn’t go up the mountain, we had to carry the wounded on ourselves,” says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - They were carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, such a healthy man, carried about thirty people. Covered in blood, but did not stop.
Sergei Stolyarov made three trips on an electric locomotive with wounded people. At the Ulu-Telyak station, he, a driver with two months of experience, missed the 212th ambulance and went on a freight train after it. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned cars. On the embankment, the overhead wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burned people into the cabin, Stolyarov moved to the siding and returned to the scene of the disaster with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless and loaded, loaded... He returned home - his shirt was like a stake from the clotted blood of someone else.
“All the village equipment arrived, they were transported on tractors,” recalled the chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm, Sergei Kosmakov. - The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children bandaged them...
Specialized help came much later - after one and a half to two hours.
“At 1.45 a.m. the control panel received a call that a carriage was burning near Ulu-Telyak,” says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in the city of Ufa. — Ten minutes later they clarified that the entire train had burned out. All duty ambulances were removed from the line and equipped with gas masks. No one knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. The cars just went to the torch...
“We got out of the car into the ashes, the first thing we saw was a doll and a severed leg...” said the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. “I can’t imagine how many painkilling injections I had to give.” When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. Both the baby’s mother and father died.” There were no seats in the car, so I sat the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair was curled into baked rings - like a lamb’s, and she smelled like a roasted lamb... I still can’t forget this little girl. On the way, she told me that her name was Zhanna and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age then.
We found Zhanna, who was being taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. In the book of memory. Zhanna Floridovna Akhmadeeva, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three she died at the Ufa Children's Republican Hospital.
Trees fell as if in a vacuum. At the scene of the tragedy there was a strong smell of corpses. The carriages, for some reason rusty in color, lay a few meters from the tracks, flattened and bent. It’s hard to even imagine what temperature could make iron wriggle like that. It’s amazing that in this fire, on the ground that had turned to coke, where electrical poles and sleepers were uprooted, people could still remain alive!
— The military later determined: the power of the explosion was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half atomic bomb, which the Americans dropped on Hiroshima,” said Sergei Kosmakov, chairman of the Red Sunrise village council.
“We ran to the scene of the explosion—the trees were falling as if in a vacuum—to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so powerful that glass was broken in all houses within a 12-kilometer radius. We found pieces from the carriages at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.
“Patients were brought in on dump trucks, on trucks side by side: alive, unconscious, already dead...,” recalls resuscitator Vladislav Zagrebenko. — They loaded in the dark. They were sorted according to the principle of military medicine. The seriously wounded - with one hundred percent burns - are placed on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When we walked through the floors of the hospital, it felt like we were at war. In the wards, in the corridors, in the hall there were black people with severe burns. I have never seen anything like this, even though I worked in intensive care.
In Chelyabinsk, children from school No. 107 boarded the ill-fated train, heading to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards. It is interesting that the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before departure, ran to the station manager to convince her that, due to safety regulations, the carriage with the children should be placed at the beginning of the train. I wasn’t convinced... Their “zero” carriage was attached to the very end.
“In the morning we found out that only one platform remained from our trailer car,” says Irina Konstantinova, director of school No. 107 in Chelyabinsk. - Out of 54 people, 9 survived. Head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So the two of them died. Neither our military instructor Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov nor the children’s favorite teacher Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova were found. One high school student was identified only by his watch, another by the net in which his parents put food for his journey.
“My heart sank when the train arrived with the relatives of the victims,” said Anatoly Bezrukov. “They peered with hope into the carriages, crumpled like pieces of paper. Elderly women crawled with plastic bags in their hands, hoping to find at least something left of their relatives.
After the wounded were taken away, the burnt and mangled pieces of their bodies were collected - arms, legs, shoulders were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and placed on stretchers. By the evening, when the refrigerators arrived, there were about 20 such stretchers filled with human remains. But even in the evening, civil defense soldiers continued to remove the remains of flesh fused into the iron from the cars with cutters. In a separate pile they put things found in the area - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason whole and unharmed, not even singed.
Salavat Abdulin, the father of the deceased high school student Irina, found her hair clip in the ashes, which he himself repaired before the trip, and her shirt.
“The daughter was not on the lists of survivors,” he will recall later. “We searched for her in hospitals for three days. No traces. And then my wife and I went through the refrigerators... There was one girl there. She is similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I’d recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either...
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently released. To remove the wounded from the Asha and Iglino hospitals to Ufa, they used helicopter school. The cars landed in the city center in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the “helipad” to this day. The cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.
“The first patient was admitted to us at 6:58 a.m.,” said the head of the burn center in Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. — From eight in the morning until lunch, there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all of them had burns of the upper respiratory tract. Half of the victims had more than 70% of their bodies burned. Our center had just opened; there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and fibrin film in stock, which is applied to the burned surface. By lunchtime, teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived.
There were many children among the victims. I remember one boy had two mothers, each of whom was sure that her son was in the crib... Two mothers claimed one child at once.
An unbearable situation reigned at the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, fainting right there. The father and young girl who arrived from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, unlike other relatives, were glowing with happiness. They came to see their son and husband, a young family with two children.
“We don’t need lists,” they wave it off. “We know he survived.” Pravda wrote on the first page that he saved children. We know what lies in Hospital No. 21.
Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning carriages. But the publication stated that the hero had 98% burns. The wife and father shift from foot to foot, they want to quickly leave the mournful headquarters, where people are crying.
“Pick it up, at the morgue,” says the phone number of Hospital No. 21.
Nadya Shugaeva, milkmaid from Novosibirsk region suddenly starts laughing hysterically.
- Found it, found it!
The attendants try to smile forcefully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found it... on the lists of the dead.
The switchmen were responsible for the disaster. When the wind was still carrying the ashes of those burned alive, powerful equipment was driven to the site of the disaster. Fearing an epidemic due to unburied fragments of bodies smeared on the ground and beginning to decompose, they hastened to raze the scorched lowland of 200 hectares to the ground. The builders were responsible for the death of people, for the terrible burns and injuries that more than a thousand people received.
From the very beginning, the investigation turned on very important people: the leaders of the industry design institute, who approved the project with violations. The deputy minister was also charged oil industry Dongaryan, who, by his order, in order to save money, canceled telemetry - devices that monitor the operation of the entire highway. There was a helicopter that flew around the entire route, it was canceled, there was a lineman - the lineman was also removed.
On December 26, 1992, the trial took place. It turned out that the gas leak from the overpass occurred due to a crack caused to it four years before the disaster, in October 1985, by an excavator bucket during construction work. The product pipeline was backfilled with mechanical damage. The case was sent for further investigation. Six years later, the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan handed down a sentence - all defendants were sentenced to two years in a penal settlement. In the dock were the site manager, foreman, foremen, and builders. “Switchmen.”
In 1989, such a structure as the Ministry of Emergency Situations did not exist. Typewritten lists of the dead, deceased and survivors at the headquarters were updated hourly (!), although no computers existed, and over a thousand victims were scattered throughout all the hospitals of the republic. Death from burns occurs within a few days, and a real pestilence began in clinics in the first week after the tragedy. The mother could call from the airport and receive information that her son was alive, and, upon reaching the headquarters, find the name already on the list of the dead. It was necessary not only to record the death of a person who often could not even say his name, but also to organize the sending of the coffin to his homeland, having found out all the data of the deceased.
Meanwhile, planes from all over the then huge country with relatives of the victims landed at the Ufa airport; they needed to be accommodated somewhere and soldered with valerian. All the surrounding sanatoriums were filled with unhappy parents who searched for their children in the morgue for several days. Those who were “luckier” and their relatives were identified were met by doctors at the stations and after a few hours they flew to hometown on a plane specially arranged for them.
The internationalist soldiers took on the hardest work. Afghans volunteered to help the special services where even experienced doctors could not stand it. The corpses of the dead did not fit in the Ufa morgue on Tsvetochnaya and human remains were stored in refrigerated vehicles. Considering that it was incredibly hot outside, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flocked from all over the area. This work required the volunteers' endurance and physical strength, all arriving dead had to be placed on hastily put together shelves, tagged, and sorted. Many could not stand it, shuddering and vomiting.
Relatives, distraught with grief, looking for their children, did not notice anything around, peering intently at the charred fragments of bodies. Moms and dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles, had wild dialogues:
Isn't this our Lenochka? - they said, crowding around a black piece of meat.
No, our Lenochka had folds on her arms...
How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.
In order not to traumatize relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, with photographs from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies placed on the pages. This terrible collection of death had pages stamped “identified.” However, many still went to the refrigerators, hoping that the photographs lie. And the guys who had recently come from a real war were subjected to suffering that they had not seen while fighting the dushmans. Often the guys were the first to medical care those who fainted and found themselves on the verge of madness from grief, or with impassive faces they helped turn over the charred bodies of their relatives.
You can’t revive the dead; despair came when the living began to arrive,” the Afghans later said, talking about the most difficult experiences.
There were also funny cases.
“In the morning, a man came to the village council from the Novosibirsk train, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch,” said district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. “He doesn’t remember how he got out of the train that caught fire.” I lost my way in the forest at night, unconscious. Those who were left behind from the train showed up at headquarters.
Looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place at the railway station.
Why should we look for you? - they were surprised there, but looked at the lists by rote.
Eat! - the young man was delighted when he found his name in the column of missing persons.
Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he doesn’t remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the stop, and only when I had sobered up did I learn about what had happened. I got to Ufa and reported that I was alive. At this time, the young man’s mother methodically walked around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.
Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine how much metal and burnt debris they had to shovel human flesh. 11 cars were thrown off the track, 7 of them were completely burned. People worked fiercely, not paying attention to the heat, the stench and the almost physical horror of death hovering in this sticky syrup.
What the heck did you eat? - a young soldier with an autogenous gun shouts to an elderly man in uniform. Colonel General Civil Defense carefully lifts his foot from the human jaw.
Sorry,” he mutters in confusion and disappears into the headquarters located in the nearest tent.
In this episode, all the contradictory emotions that those present experienced: anger at human weakness in the face of the elements, and embarrassment - quiet joy that it is not their remains that are being collected, and horror mixed with stupefaction - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.
Chelyabinsk has lost its hockey hope. The 107th school in Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, and the Traktor sports club lost its youth hockey team, two-time national champions. Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: his grandmother broke her arm.
Of the ten hockey players who were champions of the Union among regional national teams, only one survived, Alexander Sychev, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Generalgard, Andrei Kulazhenkin, and goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrei Shevchenko, lived the longest of the burned guys, five days. On June 15 he would have celebrated his sixteenth birthday.
“My husband and I managed to see him,” says Andrei’s mother Natalya Antonovna. — We found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. “He was lying like a mummy, covered in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we were taking him to Moscow, he kept asking: “Where are the guys?”
The Traktor club, a year after the tragedy, organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the deceased hockey players, which became traditional. The goalkeeper of the deceased Traktor-73 team, Boris Tortunov, who then stayed at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, pupils of the Traktor school raised money for prizes for the tournament participants, which are traditionally awarded to the mothers and fathers of the dead children.
575 (according to other sources 645) people died, 657 received burns and injuries. The bodies and ashes of those burned alive were taken to 45 regions of Russia and 9 republics of the former Union.
