The word of the metallurgists

The owners of the collapsed pool found a lot of rust in it

The management of the Chusovsky Metallurgical Plant (ChMZ) yesterday announced the results of its investigation into the causes of the accident in its Dolphin swimming pool, where 14 people died due to a roof collapse on December 4. According to experts hired by the company, the cause of the tragedy was corrosion of 50% of the supporting beam of the pool roof. The Prosecutor's Office of the Perm Territory, which opened a criminal case about “negligence leading to the death of people,” has not yet completed its investigation. But as part of it, she has already arrested two experts who examined the pool structures in the summer of 2004 and, according to the prosecutor’s office, hid information about the defects of the ill-fated beam. Representatives of the plant yesterday did not rule out that part of the blame for the emergency lies with the pool builders.

To determine the causes of the emergency in the Dolphin swimming pool in the city of Chusovoy, three commissions were created. Two - the regional administration and the prosecutor's office - have not finished their work yet. But the third, created by ChMP itself, has already made conclusions and announced them yesterday at a press conference in Moscow. She came to the conclusion that either the designers, or the builders, or the experts of Uralpromexpert LLC who conducted the latest research, or all of them together, were guilty.

During the inspection of construction documentation, the ChMZ commission found out a number of deviations from the project, design changes and the use of outdated standards. In particular, this concerned the design of the load-bearing roof trusses, one of which subsequently collapsed. At the time of construction (1994), according to the standards in such premises, beams had to be made from rolled products of either round or quadrangular cross-section. This, according to experts, should make it difficult for condensation to get inside the structure and reduce its corrosion. In "Dolphin" the beams were made from an angular profile. In addition, the builders changed the roof structure itself, as a result of which the load on the beams almost doubled. The ChMZ commission considered one of the key shortcomings of the builders to be the design of the ventilation shaft, in which, due to the lack of thermal insulation, condensation could accumulate, which would then flow onto the ill-fated beam. To ensure the objectivity of the investigation, the management of ChMP ordered an examination from the Proektstalkonstruktsiya Institute (Ekaterinburg). Its expert Anatoly Olenichev said yesterday that, according to preliminary analysis, the corrosion of the object’s load-bearing truss was about 50%, and “meanwhile, the structure is considered pre-failure if corrosion reaches 35%.” Mr. Olenichev noted that under such conditions the steel beam provided for in the project would have collapsed. At first it was assumed that the load-bearing beams would be made of 09GS2 steel, but later it was replaced with a less durable one.

Also, representatives of ChMP drew attention to the technical report of experts from Uralpromexpert LLC, who conducted an inspection of the Dolphin building structures in the summer of 2004. It noted that work on anti-corrosion treatment of the pool roof had not been carried out for a year and a half, but the amount of corrosion of the supporting beam was indicated as only 5-7%. Meanwhile, as Mr. Olenichev stated, the rate of metal corrosion in such an environment is only 0.1-0.5 mm per year. This means that the true extent of the corrosion was either not noticed during the inspection in the summer of 2004 or was deliberately hidden. However, why independent experts, who do not own the building, needed to do this, ChMP director Anatoly Karpov could not explain. As well as why the management of ChMP, knowing about the violations during the construction of the pool, did not stop its operation.

Eduard LOMOVTSEV