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.
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-out carriages 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 served the site - were punished. They were given two years in prison.
On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the largest train accident in the history of the USSR and Russia occurred at the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The explosion and fire, which killed over 600 people, are known as the Ashinskaya disaster or the tragedy near Ufa. “AiF-Chelyabinsk” collected stories from people who, 29 years later, still remember what happened as clearly as if it happened yesterday.
“We thought a war had started”
Those who happened to go through the fiery hell and survive remember the terrible moments in detail. For many, these pictures are deeply etched in their memory, even despite their young age. Since 2011, they have been sharing their stories on a page dedicated to the memory of the victims of the disaster.
“When this tragedy happened, I was five years old,” says Tatyana S. “My parents and two brothers and I went to the south to relax, but we didn’t get there. Even though I was little, I remember everything as it is now: the explosion, the flames, the screams, the fear... Thank God, everyone in my family survived, but it’s impossible to forget. We were traveling in the third carriage of train 211, it was night... my dad was in another carriage (he was in the video salon). When the explosion occurred, we thought that a war had begun. Dad somehow ended up on the street and walked, not knowing where - his consciousness became clouded from the explosion - but, as it turned out later, he was walking towards us. We stood in the middle of the compartment and couldn’t get out, everything was dripping (plastic) and everything was burning, we couldn’t break the glass, but then it broke on its own due to the temperature. We saw dad and started shouting to him, he came up, mom threw us (the children) out his window, it was very high, and that’s how we got out. It was very cold, my feet stuck to the ground. Mom took the blanket with her teeth, since her hands were burned, wrapped me up and we walked for several kilometers along the rails, along the bridge on which only trains travel, it was terribly dark. In general, if dad had gone in the other direction, everything would have turned out differently.
We got to some station, locomotives rushed past us at breakneck speed, everyone was in shock, but then we were all evacuated to hospitals. Mom was taken to Kuibyshev, dad to Moscow, brothers to Ufa, and me to Nizhny Novgorod. I have a 20% burn, my mom and dad have my hands, and my brothers are lucky, they have superficial burns. Rehabilitation took a very long time, several years, especially psychologically, because watching people burn alive is not just scary, but terrifying... And this Novosibirsk-Adler route haunts me all my life, it so happened that my brother went to live to the south and I have to ride this train, and only God knows how my soul turns inside out when I ride it.”
Among others, a man shared his story, who then went south, to the sea, with his wife and little daughter.
“We were traveling in a compartment, a young mother with a boy of 6-8 months and her mother were traveling with us. Neither I nor my daughter heard the explosion; she and I probably shouldn’t have woken up. My wife and daughter slept on the bottom bunk, I on the top. A grandmother with her grandson is on the bottom, a young mother is on the top. I was sleeping on my stomach, and then, as if from a cellar: “Valera, Valera...” I opened my eyes: the compartment was on fire. “Mother of God, where is Olesya?” There are no partitions, I began to scatter the remains of the partitions, the skin on my fingers immediately turned out like on boiled sausages. “Dad, dad...” Found it! Out the window, mom! “Dad, is this war? Are these Germans? Let’s go home quickly...” Grandmother and grandson out the window. "Save Natasha!" The top shelf was torn off along with her, she is sitting in the corner, the shelf is on her head. The chiffon dress melted on her, covered in bubbles. It hurt my hands, I tried with my back, and it burned me on the melting leatherette. Lifts with shelf. He tore out the shelf with his hands, his head was broken, his brain was visible. Somehow through her window and there too.
We walked. I was at the 20th anniversary of the accident, I walked that path again, two km. It was the right decision then. Some climbed into the river, into the water, and died there; some fled into the forest. A wife with a broken ankle was carrying her daughter on her back. She didn’t cry, didn’t scream, she had 4th degree burns, her nerve endings were burned out. At the stop - two or three barracks - about 30 people gathered. Wild screams of the survivors, as if all the dead in the world had woken up at once. After some time, a fire train approached, distraught people rushed to it, the firefighters had no choice but to pick up the people and return them to Ulu-Telyak. “Dad, why are you so scary? Dad, do I have candy in my hands (burn blisters)?” - the last thing I heard from her. At the Ulu-Telyak hospital they euthanized her with injections. By bus to Asha. “I won’t go anywhere without my wife and child.” In Asha, my wife is in the ward with her daughter, I am with them: “Nowhere without me.”
After some time on the helicopter to Ufa, I begin to “float” from the injections. To the operating room only with my daughter. I started crying. "What are you doing?" "Everything is fine". “What time is it? 12? God, I've been on my feet for 12 hours. Put me to sleep! No strength". After anesthesia, a person is such a vegetable... Mom, father-in-law, wife's brother... Where from? A compassionate woman in Ulu-Telyak sent a telegram, I bow to her. “Where is Olesya? Allah? "In this hospital." Fell asleep. I woke up, they were dragging me somewhere, my mother was nearby. "Where?" “To Moscow” “Olesya?” "With you". The four young soldiers were somehow on a stretcher. “Drop it, I’ll get up on my own now!” “Where, you can’t!” “Black Tulip” (An-12 plane - editor's note) - an old friend, a two-story stretcher. And everyone: “Drink! Mom, drink!” In Moscow, I woke up in Sklif, my hands were like boxing gloves. “Will you cut it?” “No, boy, hold on...”
My daughter died on June 19, fully conscious in terrible agony, her kidneys were failing... They told me about this, having previously pumped me full of morphine, on the ninth day. He tore the bandages, howled like a wolf... A thunderstorm, such as I had never heard before or since, a hurricane of rain that day. These are the tears of the departed. A year later, to the same day, on June 19, a son was born..."
"The pain doesn't go away"
The explosion of the gas mixture was so powerful that the bodies of some passengers were never found later. Some died immediately, others unsuccessfully tried to get out, and those who managed to leave the hot cars died later from burns. The burned adults tried to save the children - there were many schoolchildren on the train who were going on vacation.
“My friend Andrei Dolgachev fell into this “hell” when he was traveling home from the army to the city of Novoanninsky, Volgograd region, train No. 211, car 9,” writes Vladimir B. “The car did not overturn, but it burned out completely. That night, Andrei pulled a burnt pregnant woman out of the carriage; her fate is unknown to me. He didn’t have very many burns (about 28%), although they were deep. Andrei died two weeks after the disaster at the Sverdlovsk Burn Center. He was 18 years old. The family was poor, they were buried by the whole city. Eternal memory to everyone who died there!”
“My uncle, Kirtava Rezo Razhdenovich, 19 years old, after training he was going to another military unit. That night, he pulled more than ten children from the burning train who were traveling from the camp, says Tamara B. He received burns incompatible with life (80%), the burns were received just during the rescue of the children. He died on the fourth day after the disaster. Posthumously awarded... A street in the village where he was born and raised was named in his honor: the village of Leselidze (Kingisepp), Abkhazian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Georgia.”
“My employee’s relatives died in this disaster: his brother’s wife and two sons,” Galina D. shares her story. “My brother was a military man, so in search of his family he had the opportunity to fly over the scene of the disaster by helicopter. What he saw shocked him. Unfortunately, his relatives were traveling in one of the last carriages, the same ones that were at the epicenter of the explosion. All that was left of the carriage itself was the wheeled platform, everything burned to the ground. He never found his beloved and dear wife and children; earth and ashes were buried in coffins. A few years later, this man married again and had a son. But according to his sister (my employee), this nightmare still does not leave him, he does not feel truly happy, despite the fact that his son and heir are growing up. He lives with pain that does not go away, despite time.”
“The whole body is a complete burn”
The news of the disaster spread quickly, and within half an hour first aid arrived at the scene of the explosion - local residents began to help the wounded and take people to hospitals. Hundreds of people worked at the scene of the tragedy - young cadets cleared the rubble, railway workers restored the tracks, doctors and volunteer assistants evacuated the victims. Doctors recall that there were queues of people wishing to donate blood for the wounded at the hospitals in Asha, Chelyabinsk, Ufa and Novosibirsk.
“I was 8 years old, we were vacationing with relatives in Iglino,” recalls Evgenia M. “My aunt worked in the hospital as a nurse, a colleague came running for her in the morning, and they called the entire medical staff. During the day we went outside - there was a roar in the sky from helicopters, it was scary. A group of children went to the hospital. I still remember the picture - a little girl, about three years old, is being carried from the ambulance, she is crying, she has no clothes and her whole body is completely burnt... It was terrible.”
"Was there. From the Ufa Air Force training on Karl Marx, - writes Dmitry G. - Wake up on alarm in the morning, take your lunch and take the Ikarus to the place. They collected the dead, there were not enough mittens, they tore some rags and wrapped their hands. I don’t remember the stretchers, they were carried on raincoats and laid out with them. The fires were then extinguished further, further away, where the forest was smoldering. Gorbachev flew in, Yazov, helicopters flew before their arrival, we were placed in a cordon around their deliberative tent. There were not only ours, other soldiers, railway workers, like, or construction battalion workers... Cadets, I don’t remember where exactly.”
Birthday disaster
Almost always, after major disasters, there are people on transport who were saved by chance from death - they were late and decided to return their tickets. A similar story was told by Yulia M. from the Chelyabinsk region; at the time of the Ashinsky tragedy she was very young.
“This disaster happened on my birthday, I was about to turn three years old, and my parents decided to give me a gift - a trip to my grandmother. Since I grew up in the military town of DOS (city of Chebarkul), we had to leave from this station. Every year, tickets were purchased directly a few hours before the train (such were the circumstances), and always safely. But this time the following happened: dad periodically ran to the box office to inquire about tickets, the cashier told him every time, don’t worry, you will have tickets five hours before arrival. Closer to that time, dad comes up to find out again, and they tell him: come back in an hour. Me, mom and dad spent the whole day at the station. The older brother was already with his grandmother (they wanted to go to Tambov). As a result, upon the arrival of the train, the cashier says: it’s not possible with tickets, but they will be there tomorrow. Dad quarreled with her, mom and dad quarreled with each other out of nerves, I’m crying... And since the transport was no longer running, we went home with our suitcases through the forest, nervous and upset. And in the morning we found out that such a tragedy had occurred... So my birthday is double and on the same date.”
"Almost no one knows"
The investigation lasted several years, and the official version states that the cause of the explosion was a leak of hydrocarbons from the main pipeline and the subsequent detonation of the gas-air mixture from an accidental spark in a place where two oncoming trains Adler-Novosibirsk and Novosibirsk-Adler were passing simultaneously. It is known that a few hours before the tragedy, the driver of a passing train reported the smell of gas, but they decided to deal with this problem later. It turned out that the pipeline itself ran too close to the railway.
“I remember about the disaster from the age of 6, my parents talked about two trains with which something happened, I learned the details at the age of 16, I remember exactly, because it was just 10 years since the disaster,” says Yulia K., “I studied I watched all the materials I found and watched all the films. I tell my students and am very surprised that almost no one knows anything about the disaster. It is clear that today’s students were born much later than 1989, but we live in Chelyabinsk, many of them are from the region, this is, among other things, the history of our region.”
At the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway there is a memorial to the victims of the Ashinsky disaster; every year those whose lives that night divided into “before” and “after” come to see it. It would seem that such a tragedy should have become a cruel lesson about what happens due to human negligence. Both the participants in those events and the relatives of the victims really want that no one else has to experience the pain they experienced.
This day in history:
The train accident near Ufa is the largest in the history of Russia and the USSR, which occurred on June 4 (June 3, Moscow time) 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 section.
At the moment of the oncoming passage of two passenger trains No. 211 “Novosibirsk - Adler” and No. 212 “Adler - Novosibirsk”, a powerful explosion of a cloud of light hydrocarbons occurred as a result of an accident on the nearby Siberia - Ural - Volga region pipeline. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), 181 of them were children, more than 600 were injured.
On June 4, 1989, at 01:15 local time (June 3 at 23:15 Moscow time), when two passenger trains met, a powerful volumetric gas explosion occurred and a gigantic fire broke out.
People had already gone to bed, many were undressed... the carriages were filled with passengers. There were many children and schoolchildren traveling on the trains. Therefore, after the explosion, many, even the survivors, were undressed... To say that people and children were in a state of shock is to say nothing... The children with 90% of body burns, being in shock, regretted that they had not reached the sea, asked to give something to my mother, they asked where the watch was, what was on my hand, where was the toy... and five minutes later they died. The adults did not understand what was happening, they thought that a war had started, they were bombing, and were hiding in the forest. They were afraid of repeated blows.
Parents considered it lucky, no matter how blasphemous it may sound, if they found the body of a child, because many parents whose children were traveling alone (schoolchildren, teenagers) were given simply fragments of clothes, bodies, or nothing... some never found the missing ones.
Residents of nearby houses set up infirmaries in their houses, windows were broken in the houses, the walls were splattered with blood, stained with ash, and saturated with smoke. Eyewitnesses say that they swept fingers and fragments of bodies from houses where they were brought by the blast wave. The explosion was so powerful.
In total, 1,284 passengers (including 383 children) and 86 members of train and locomotive crews traveled on the trains.
At least 575 people died (more than 1,000 people were injured - on the platform as well, 623 were left disabled), but it is clear that there were more, since many of the dead remained missing, their ashes scattered in the night air of a random village.
That is, a few of those caught up in that ill-fated tragedy remained safe and relatively unharmed, mainly those who survived received varying degrees of damage and remained disabled.
Eyewitnesses spoke of a black mushroom rising into the sky after the explosion, of scorched forests kilometers away from the disaster... of hundreds of fragments of burnt human bodies, of children dying without help.
The main mechanical cause of the explosion was called damage to the gas pipeline by an excavator bucket (as a result of an accumulated cloud of gas and a spark from the close movement of two trains, an explosion occurred), they found the “switchmen”, imprisoned them for a couple of years, then released them on probation...
The personnel on duty, having noticed a decrease in pressure in the gas pipeline several hours before the disaster (even freight train drivers more than once reported to dispatchers about heavy gas pollution in this section), instead of looking for a leak, they increased the pressure even more, and a lot of gas accumulated in the pocket of the section. The fire could have started from a cigarette thrown out the window.
Among the political versions, sabotage and a terrorist attack were again considered, all with the same goals as during the 1988 tragedy in Arzamas (provocations of the West, undermining the country’s authority). After all, it is impossible to believe in mysticism when tragedies occur on the same day a year apart... It is unlikely that this is a coincidence.
But whatever the political goals, the fact of the carelessness of the staff on duty and service workers is again obvious. We will never know what exactly was the reason, but the human factor played a fatal role in this tragedy - this is obvious.
Original taken from schnause at the age of 25. June 4, 1989. Disaster in Chelyabinsk.
June 4, 2014 marks 25 years since a railway transport disaster of a monstrous scale and casualties occurred. The disaster on the Asha - Ulu Telyak stretch is the largest disaster in the history of Russia and the USSR, which occurred on June 4, 1989, 11 km from the city of Asha. As two passenger trains passed, there was a powerful explosion of an unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture formed as a result of an accident on the nearby Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), more than 600 were injured.
The disaster is considered the largest in the history of the USSR and Russia.
Trains No. 211 Novosibirsk-Adler (20 cars) and No. 212 Adler-Novosibirsk (18 cars) carried 1,284 passengers, including 383 children and 86 people from train and locomotive crews.
The train from Novosibirsk that night was late due to technical reasons, and the oncoming train stopped at an intermediate station shortly before the tragedy for an urgent disembarkation - a woman went into labor right in the carriage.
Significant passengers traveling to Adler were already looking forward to a quiet holiday at sea. Those who, on the contrary, were already returning from vacation, were driving towards them. The explosion, which occurred in the middle of the night, is estimated by experts as equivalent to an explosion of three hundred tons of TNT. According to unofficial data, the power of the explosion in Ulu-Telyak was approximately the same as in Hiroshima - about 12 kilotons.
The explosion destroyed 38 cars and two electric locomotives. 11 cars were thrown off the tracks by the shock wave, 7 of them were completely burned. The remaining 26 cars were burned on the outside and burned out inside. In a radius of three kilometers around the epicenter, centuries-old trees were felled.
350 meters of railway tracks and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion engulfed an area of about 250 hectares. Later, the investigation will find out that the root cause of the gas leak and explosion was poor-quality welding of the gas pipeline. The result is a violation of the tightness of the seams. Gas is heavier than air, and there is a large depression in this place. An explosive mixture formed and the trains entered a completely gas-contaminated area, where a small spark was enough for a powerful explosion.
During operation from 1985 to 1989, 50 major accidents and failures occurred on the product pipeline, which, however, did not lead to human casualties. After the accident near Ufa, the product pipeline was not restored and was liquidated.
Memoirs of an eyewitness.
June 4, 1989. It was very hot these days. The weather was sunny and the air was warm. It was 30 degrees outside. My parents worked on the railroad, and on June 7, Mom and I went on the “memory” train from the station. Ufa to op. 1710 km. By that time, the wounded and dead had already been taken out, the railway connection had already been established, but what I saw 2 hours after departure... I will never forget! There was nothing a few kilometers before the epicenter of the explosion. Everything was burned! Where once there was forest, grass, bushes, now everything was covered with ash. It's like napalm, which burned out everything, leaving nothing in return. Mangled carriages lay everywhere, and there were fragments of mattresses and sheets on the miraculously surviving trees. There were also fragments of human bodies scattered everywhere... and that’s the smell, it was hot outside and the smell of corpses was everywhere. And tears, grief, grief, grief...
The explosion of a large volume of gas distributed in space had the character of a volumetric explosion. The power of the explosion was estimated at 300 tons of trinitrotoluene. According to other estimates, the power of the volumetric explosion could reach up to 10 kilotons of TNT, which is comparable to the power of the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (12.5 kilotons). The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave broke windows in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene of the incident. The column of flame was visible more than 100 km away. 350 meters of railway tracks and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion engulfed an area of about 250 hectares.
The official version claims that the gas leak from the product pipeline was possible due to damage caused to it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak began 40 minutes before the explosion.
According to another version, the cause of the accident was the corrosive effect on the outer part of the pipe of electric leakage currents, the so-called “stray currents” of the railway. 2-3 weeks before the explosion, a micro fistula formed, then, as a result of cooling of the pipe, a crack that grew in length appeared at the point of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without coming out, and gradually went down the slope to the railway.
When the two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark occurred, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.
22 years have already passed since this monstrous disaster occurred near Ulu-Telyak. More than 600 people died. How many people were left crippled? Many remained missing. The real culprits of this disaster were never found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “switchmen” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not for the carelessness and negligence that we encountered then. The drivers reported that there was a strong smell of gas, but no action was taken. We must not forget about this tragedy, the pain that people experienced... Until now, every day we are notified of one or another sad incident. Where, by chance, more than 600 lives were interrupted. For their family and friends, this place is on the land of Bashkortostan - the 1710th kilometer along the railway...
In addition, I provide excerpts from Soviet newspapers that wrote about the disaster at that time:
From the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Council of Ministers of the USSR On June 3 at 23:14 Moscow time, a gas leak occurred as a result of an accident on a liquefied gas product pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa section of the railway. During the passage of two oncoming passenger trains with destinations Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk, a large explosion and fire occurred. There are numerous victims.
At approximately 23:10 Moscow time, one of the drivers radioed: they had entered a zone of heavy gas pollution. After that, the connection was lost... As we now know, after that there was an explosion. Its strength was such that all the glass on the central estate of the Red Sunrise collective farm flew out. And this is several kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. We also saw a heavy pair of wheels, which in an instant found itself in the forest at a distance of more than five hundred meters from the railway. The rails were twisted into unimaginable loops. What then can we say about people? A lot of people died. From some, only a pile of ashes remained. It’s hard to write about this, but the train heading to Adler included two carriages with children going to a pioneer camp. Most of them burned down.
Disaster on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Here's what the Izvestia correspondent was told at the Ministry of Railways: The pipeline on which the disaster occurred runs about a kilometer from the Ufa-Chelyabinsk highway (Kuibyshev railway). At the time of the explosion and the resulting fire, passenger trains 211 (Novosibirsk-Adler) and 212 (Adler - Novosibirsk) were moving towards each other. The impact of the blast wave and flame threw fourteen cars off the track, destroyed the contact network, damaged communication lines and the railway track for several hundred meters. The fire spread to the trains, and the fire was extinguished within a few hours. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a rupture in the Western Siberia - Ural pipeline near the Asha railway station. Raw materials for Kuibyshev chemical plants are distilled through it. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the scene of the accident, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline runs through mountainous terrain. Over a period of time, gas accumulated in two deep hollows and, for reasons still unknown, exploded. The front of the rising flame was approximately one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbon that had accumulated at the rupture site had burned out. It turned out that long before the explosion, residents of nearby settlements felt a strong smell of gas in the air. It spread over a distance of approximately 4 to 8 kilometers. Such messages came from the population around 21:00 local time, and the tragedy, as is known, occurred later. However, instead of searching for and eliminating the leak, someone (while the investigation is ongoing) added pressure to the pipeline and the gas continued to spread through the hollows.
Explosion on a summer night.
As a result of the leak, gas gradually accumulated in the ravine and its concentration increased. Experts believe that the freight and passenger trains passing alternately with a powerful air flow paved a safe “corridor” for themselves, and the trouble was pushed aside. According to this version, it might have been pushed back this time, since the Novosibirsk - Adler and Adler - Novosibirsk trains, according to the railway schedule, were not supposed to meet on this section. But by a tragic accident, on the train heading to Adler, one of the women went into premature labor. Doctors among the passengers provided first aid to her. At the nearest station, the train was delayed for 15 minutes to hand over the mother and child to the called ambulance. And when the fatal meeting took place in a polluted area, the “corridor effect” did not work. A tiny spark from under the wheels, a smoldering cigarette thrown out the window, or a lit match was enough to ignite the explosive mixture.
On June 6 in Ufa, a meeting of the government commission was held, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G.G. Vedernikov. The Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the commission on urgent measures to provide assistance to those injured as a result of the railway disaster. He reported that as of 7 a.m. on June 6, there were 503 wounded people in Ufa medical institutions, including 115 children, and 299 people were in serious condition. There are 149 victims in medical institutions in Chelyabinsk, including 40 children; 299 people are in serious condition. As was reported at the meeting, according to preliminary data, there were about 1,200 people on both trains at the time of the disaster. It is still difficult to give a more precise figure, due to the fact that the number of children under five years of age traveling on trains, for whom, according to the current regulations, train tickets were not purchased, and possible passengers who also did not purchase tickets, is unknown.
Until the time of the disaster, trains No. 211 and No. 212 had never met at this point. The delay of train No. 212 for technical reasons and the stop of train No. 211 at an intermediate station to disembark a woman who had gone into labor brought these two passenger trains to the fatal place at the same time.
This is what a cold news report sounds like.
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 sort it out...
On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak at 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 the embankment.
The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time.
A giant flash was seen tens of kilometers away
Until now, the mystery of this terrible catastrophe worries astrologers, scientists, and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met in a dangerous place where a product pipeline leaked? 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 names 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, they dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky Department of Internal Affairs and a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. “We rushed to the fire in cars and tractors. The equipment could not climb the steep slope. 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.
Cars couldn’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. Now Zhanna should be 21, quite a bride...
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 Children's Republican Hospital in Ufa.
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, bizarrely flattened and curved. 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 the atomic bomb that 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 learned 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.
His daughter was not on the living lists, he would 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...
Two mothers claimed one child at once
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently released. To bring the wounded from the Asha and Iglino hospitals to Ufa, a helicopter school was used. 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 on the crib...
American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, made a round, and said: “No more than 40 percent will survive.” Like in a nuclear explosion, when the main injury is a burn. We rescued half of those whom they considered doomed. I remember a paratrooper from Chebarkul - Edik Ashirov, a jeweler by profession. The Americans said that he should be switched to drugs and that’s it. Like, he’s still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was one of the last to be discharged, in September.
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 telephone number of Hospital No. 21.
Nadya Shugaeva, a milkmaid from the Novosibirsk region, suddenly begins to laugh 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.
Builders were responsible for the death of people, for terrible burns and injuries of more than a thousand people.
From the very beginning, the investigation turned on very important people: the leaders of the industry design institute, who approved the project with violations. Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan was also charged, who, by his order, in order to save money, canceled telemetry - instruments that monitor the operation of the entire pipeline. 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.”
Afghans worked in the morgue.
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 stamina and physical strength from the volunteers; 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:
Is this not 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 provided first aid to those who fainted and were 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.
The lucky ones were on their own
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.
There was no chain of command at the explosion site
Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine how much metal and burnt human flesh they had to shovel. 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.
At the scene of the tragedy, railway workers found huge sums of money and valuables. All of them were handed over to the state, including a savings book for 10 thousand rubles. And two days later it turned out that an Asha teenager had been arrested for looting. Three managed to escape. While others were saving the living, they tore gold jewelry from the dead along with their burnt fingers and ears. If the bastard had not been locked up under serious security in Iglino, indignant local residents would have torn him to shreds. The young cops shrugged:
If only they knew that they would have to defend the criminal...
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?” In the 13th hospital - a branch of the Institute named after. We wanted to christen Vishnevsky, but we didn’t have time. The doctors injected him with holy water three times through a catheter... He left us on the day of the Ascension of the Lord - he died quietly, unconscious.
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.
The explosion destroyed 37 cars and two electric locomotives, of which 7 cars burned completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 cars were torn off and thrown off the tracks by the shock wave. According to official data, 258 corpses were found at the scene of the accident, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. A total of 575 people died and 623 were injured.
