| The largest man-made disaster in Moscow The number of victims of the tragedy at the site of the capital's Basmanny (Baumansky) market, which early in the morning of February 23 in an instant and for no apparent reason turned into a pile of ruins, yesterday already reached 65 people. And so far none of the officials have dared to say that this figure is final.
On Friday evening, when rescuers using heavy equipment were able to dismantle the bulk of the collapsed reinforced concrete structures, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov confidently announced that 57 people had died as a result of the Baumanskaya disaster. “Maybe we have some areas where people can be, but the likelihood of this is very low,” Mr. Luzhkov said. “I think I have given the final death toll.” However, just a few hours later on Saturday night, rescuers recovered several more bodies from the rubble. And yesterday another dead person was found. The builders expected to completely dismantle the rubble only today, and only then, most likely, will it become clear how many human lives the tragedy on Baumanskaya actually claimed.
However, it is already clear that it will go down in the history of Moscow as the most terrible - both in terms of the scale of destruction and the number of victims - “peaceful” man-made disaster. The fact that the Baumansky market collapsed without the participation of terrorists was confidently stated on February 23 in the afternoon by representatives of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the Moscow City Hall. And yesterday afternoon, the investigative team of the Moscow prosecutor's office, created to investigate the causes of the emergency, found the first alleged culprit of the tragedy. It was the director of the State Unitary Enterprise “Basmanny Market” Mark Mishiev. On February 24, after the first interrogation, he was detained, and yesterday at about 17.00 Mr. Mishiev was formally charged under Art. 109-3 (causing death by negligence of two or more persons). According to investigators, he did not fulfill a number of requirements in various areas of safety - sanitary, fire, administrative and technical, etc.
However, it remains a mystery what exactly could have caused the collapse of the market building. Apparently, it will be named by the investigation in a few months at best - after a series of complex examinations have been carried out. But even then, these conclusions will undoubtedly cause a lot of objections and counter-versions - as in the case of Transvaal Park, under the ruins of which almost exactly two years ago, on February 14, 2004, 26 people died. And there will be all the more controversy and rumors surrounding the tragedy of the Baumansky market, since both buildings - the Transvaal water park and the Baumansky market - were created with the participation of the same eminent architect Nodar Kancheli. It was he who designed the structures of their dome roofs, and it is him who the prosecutor considers guilty of the collapse of Transvaal Park due to errors made in the design calculations.
According to official data from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the collapse of the Baumansky market occurred at 5.50, although residents of surrounding houses and surviving visitors and market traders called the time from 5.45 to 6.05. Moreover, the impressions of those who were inside were very similar to the testimony of eyewitnesses of the disaster in the Transvaal. First, a loud crash was heard from above, a second later glass, pieces of concrete and metal structures fell from the ceiling, after which concrete beams and ceilings began to fall into the trading floor with a whistle and roar. The first ambulances and rescuers began to drive up to the market about ten minutes later, and a truly apocalyptic picture appeared before their eyes - a huge, round building collapsed inward, as if an unknown force had fallen on it from one side. For the first hour and a half, there was turmoil at the place - together with rescuers and doctors, market traders were making their way through the ruins - many of them bloody, in tattered clothes, helping to search for and remove the bodies of the victims. Then, as more and more columns of rescuers and police arrived, a cordon was built around the market, behind which a crowd of survivors, relatives and friends of those who worked at the market that night, and residents of surrounding houses immediately gathered. The majority of those gathered - Caucasians - silently looked at the cordon taking place inside and carefully watched the rescuers going out into the street. Everyone was surrounded by a crowd of men and women, explaining where their loved ones were - who was trading, who was living in the basement, and begging to be saved. A man with a cut face told how, having heard a roar - without understanding why, intuitively - he rushed along the central aisle to the place where the cars were arriving for unloading, and literally jumped into the hole. He injured his face, but survived.
Until the evening of February 23, new convoys of rescuers and workers with heavy equipment arrived at the scene of the tragedy almost every half hour. At about 10 a.m., the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Sergei Shoigu, appeared at the market and immediately headed the headquarters of the rescue operation, followed by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Already in the afternoon, architect Nodar Kancheli appeared at the ruins. As it turned out, he came straight from the prosecutor's office, where he was interrogated as a witness on the first day.
By noon on February 23, the group of rescuers on Baumanskaya numbered about 800 people, not counting the doctors and cordon soldiers. Representatives of the Ministry of Emergency Situations stated that they knew the location of all the victims, all that remained was to dismantle the structures - ten dog handlers with dogs worked on the rubble, and in the first hours they showed 11 places where there could be survivors. In total, on the first day, rescuers handed over 29 people rescued from the rubble to ambulance doctors. The injuries, as noted by doctors, are very serious; many victims have serious fractures. Due to the fact that the slabs fell very tightly, according to rescuers, a “scissors effect” occurred - people’s limbs were cut off and death occurred from loss of blood.
At about 2:30 p.m., thick black smoke began to rise over the ruins, which soon enveloped the entire market building - according to rescuers, sparks from a grinder used to saw the reinforcement set fire to either spilled paint or household chemicals. After that, several fire trucks were driven to the market and filled the wreckage with foam and water until dark.
Rescuers announced the completion of the main part of the operation on the evening of February 23, when they managed to examine most of the rubble. At 18.40 the ambulances were released, with the exception of one. Unofficially, rescuers admitted that after the fire and its extinguishing, people had almost no chance of surviving under the rubble. By this time, the approximate scale of the disaster had become known - more than 50 dead.
Yesterday, representatives of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the mayor's office announced the final data on the victims and injured - 65 people were killed, 23 were hospitalized. Among the dead were 45 citizens of Azerbaijan, 8 citizens of Georgia, 3 of Uzbekistan, 5 of Tajikistan and 2 of Russia, one more dead had dual citizenship - Russia and Georgia. The body of another victim, the last to be discovered, has not yet been identified. The Ambassador of Azerbaijan to Moscow, Polad Bul-Bul Ogly, said yesterday that the bodies of three of his compatriots were sent home by plane, which he himself flew in, and the rest of the dead would be transported to Baku on a special charter flight.
Representatives of the special services and the prosecutor's office, who began interviewing eyewitnesses, decided on the main assumptions about the causes of the disaster already in the first hours after the tragedy - a terrorist attack was almost ruled out. In principle, according to unofficial information, investigators continued to study this possibility, but the official investigation focused on two other main versions - errors in design or construction and improper operating conditions of the building. At the same time, it is not excluded that the collapse could have been caused by a combination of both of these factors.
Moreover, already in the first days after the tragedy, almost all top officials, including even Patriarch Alexy II, voiced their opinion on this matter. At a meeting with President Putin, he suggested that the cause of the market collapse was the heavy snowfall and thaw (according to this version, the roof of the building could not withstand the load of accumulated wet snow). Vladimir Putin himself did not make assumptions then, noting only that “it will be necessary to conduct a thorough investigation and obtain objective information about the reasons.” Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who spent almost all of the holidays at the site of the disaster, in turn, considered the “snow version” unlikely, saying that the collapsed roof was designed for much more serious loads. The head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Sergei Shoigu, initially came to the conclusion that the cause of the tragedy was most likely a “constructive violation.”
However, regardless of the outcome of the investigation, it will still be difficult for the market director to prove his innocence. Quite obviously, regardless of any connection with the specific cause of the market collapse, he will be blamed, among other things, on the very fact of mass death of people.
Exactly how many people were in the market building at the time of the tragedy is still unknown. As it turned out from the words of surviving market employees, there were 200-300 people there at night. Some of the retail outlets of the Baumansky market worked around the clock, and some of the traders - most of them visitors from other republics of the former USSR, including illegal ones - simply lived there, some even with their families. In addition, at night the market worked as a wholesale and transshipment base, where street vendors from almost all of Moscow stocked up on food and consumer goods. All this, as it now “unexpectedly” turned out, directly contradicted sanitary, fire safety and many other standards, for compliance with which, according to the prosecutor’s office, the market director should have been responsible.
However, the work of the investigation in this direction threatens serious scandals. After all, in addition to the director himself, a variety of structures were supposed to keep order in the market - sanitary and epidemiological supervision, state supervision, technical supervision, police, and migration service. It is curious that yesterday the head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor), the chief state sanitary doctor of the Russian Federation, Gennady Onishchenko, unexpectedly spoke in this regard. “If all the requirements that we impose on markets were met, not a single person should have died, since the market is closed at night and, in principle, there should be no people there,” Onishchenko said. “The number of deaths suggests that Basic sanitary requirements are not observed in our markets - both for the people selling food and for the places where this happens. When people live there, sleep and work - what kind of compliance can we talk about? I am sure that most of these people are. are illegal immigrants, which means they do not have appropriate medical supervision. If they have a health certificate, it was probably obtained through illegitimate means.” True, Mr. Onishchenko did not explain why his service did not apply the same requirements in this case to the Baumansky market.
But another question is much more unpleasant for the authorities - that Nodar Kancheli took part in the design of the Baumansky market. The fact is that after the Transvaal tragedy, it was decided to carefully check throughout Russia, and, first of all, in Moscow, the condition of all large buildings with complex design solutions. Particular attention was paid to those objects in the design of which Mr. Kancheli took part. As a result, a special commission examined the Basmanny market, and, judging by the fact that it continued to operate, it did not find any violations, shortcomings or flaws in the design. Accordingly, the investigation will have to check the validity of the conclusions of that audit, and the signatures on its acts, obviously, were put by far from ordinary inspectors of supervisory services.
It is noteworthy that already on February 23, representatives of the prosecutor’s office unofficially reported that in December the prosecutor’s office had issued a notice to the director of the market about violations in the operation of the building and the need to eliminate them as soon as possible. At the same time, many official representatives of the mayor’s office noted this fact, explaining the reason for the detention of Mark Mishiev. However, yesterday no one was able to clearly explain to the Vremya Novostei correspondent why exactly this motion was made and what violations were discussed. Thus, one of the market administration employees stated that no one had recently made any complaints against them - neither in connection with the alleged cracks on the walls of the market, nor regarding fire safety. One of the representatives of the investigation team also said yesterday that no representations have been made in the case, at least for now. Over the last few days, prosecutors who were part of the investigation team, they said, literally spent the night at the headquarters of the rescue operation. They were absent only on trips to carry out excavations, which for the last two days have been carried out almost continuously in departments and institutions that were in one way or another connected with the preparation of design and construction documentation - Mosproekt, Mosarchitecture. In addition, investigators have already begun to study all the documentation and accounting of the market itself, which, as it turned out, was almost undamaged - the market administration was located in a small extension a little away from the collapsed building.
Meanwhile, Mr. Kancheli has made several comments in recent days. In one of the interviews, he did not rule out that the cause of the collapse could have been the overload of the second floor with the goods of traders - it was all built up with tents. A kind of mezzanine - along the entire internal perimeter of the market, which made up the second floor, was attached to external load-bearing beams. In another speech, Mr. Kancheli noted that the cause of the collapse of the market could have been snow accumulated on the roof. “Such buildings according to my design were erected in two more places - the Drinking Gallery in Essentuki and the market in Angarsk,” explained Mr. Kancheli in an interview with ITAR-TASS. “We were not so long ago approached to They examined the condition of these buildings. The roofs were opened in several places, after which operation was allowed. Apparently, the cause of the collapse could have been snow overload. No one removed it, and the roof there was not curved, like in Transvaal Park, but concave like a plate. In those years, the allowed load was 100 multiplied by a factor of 1.4 (that is, 140 kg per square meter), and now the norm is 220. But people cannot be allowed to climb onto such a roof to clear snow. “God forbid, with scrapers, the roof will only suffer.”
In turn, the Moskomarkhitektura reported that the building of the Baumansky (Basmanny) collective farm market, built in 1977, became one of the first large structures of a new type under a “hanging dome”, which began to be erected as part of a gigantic ideological project for the renewal of Moscow for the then upcoming Olympics 1980
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The Basmanny Market building was built in 1977 according to an original design developed by Mosproekt-3. Nodar Kancheli at that time was an employee of Mosproekt-1, and carried out the design of the dome and mezzanine structure. At its core, the roof of the market is a concave dome, like a plate, structurally consisting of two concrete rings. The outer large ring rested on V-shaped reinforced concrete supports located in a circle along the load-bearing walls of the market. The inner one, the one that failed, was supported by 80 radially arranged metal cables attached to the outer ring. In principle, in architectural terms, such a roof design is not considered unique and is used in the construction of various objects. Eduard LOMOVTSEV, Alexey GRISHIN |
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