The country's largest newspaper was left without a building

fire

As a result of a major fire that occurred yesterday in the building of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Press Publishing House" on Pravdy Street in Moscow, the editorial offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda, Parlamentskaya Gazeta, Tribune and Sovetskaya Rossiya were burned or flooded. Journalists who were victims of the fire are convinced that the cause of the emergency was the “Voronya Slobodka syndrome”: in an old building with wooden floors, the owners gathered many tenants, and the dilapidated wiring could not withstand the load.

Yesterday morning, a planning meeting was held in almost all editorial offices located in the building of the editorial and publishing complex on Pravdy Street. Participants in the events described subsequent events in approximately the same way: they felt a faint smell of smoke, but were in no hurry to leave - they thought that a trash can had caught fire somewhere and would soon be put out. However, at approximately 10.30, the loudspeakers installed in the corridors simultaneously “came to life” on all floors of the building. The cheerful voice of the complex's security chief demanded that everyone present leave the premises in an orderly and quick manner due to "technical problems" that had arisen.

The speaker did not have to explain the essence of the problem - people rushing out of the offices discovered that the corridors were gradually becoming clouded with suffocating smoke.

“About three or four times a year, our local firefighters organize so-called exercises,” Eldoniz Gasanov, the editorial manager of the Tribuna newspaper, told Kommersant. “They announce a drill over the internal loudspeaker and demand that everyone go outside. Every time this is an event. happens with scandals: journalists are indignant that they are being taken away from work, employees of the civil defense department insist on their own. I was always in the forefront of those who were indignant... And today I realized that I was wrong.”

The evacuation actually took place in an orderly and quick manner, although the elevators had already been turned off by this time. As journalists say, local rescuers and police guards stood at all strategically important “crossroads” between corridors and staircases and directed people to the exit. In some places, women's screams and indignant voices of bosses were heard, who were not allowed to return to their offices to pick up forgotten important papers, things and money that they kept in official safes, but there was no mass panic and stampede. About half an hour after the alarm was announced, several hundred editorial staff stood on the street in front of the building's façade and watched smoke pour out of the open windows on the sixth floor. Then, one after another, the glass in the adjacent closed windows began to burst. Flames appeared here and there, and after some time it became clear that not everyone had been evacuated from the building.

The guards either forgot or did not have time to reach the two upper floors of the building - the seventh and eighth, on which the dining room and technical rooms are located, respectively. For about ten catering staff, the smoke cut off the path down to the exit. Women without outerwear, wearing only white coats and caps, jumped out onto the only balcony on the seventh floor, used as a summer cafe-veranda, and began shouting to the journalists and firefighters standing below to save them. The firefighters shouted in response that help was already on the way, but they needed to wait a little until a mobile articulated lift with a special cradle at the end could get to the building - the bulky car was prevented from passing by private cars parked near the facade.

As a result, all the cooks, frozen and half-fainting with fear, were lowered to the ground. None of them were seriously injured. True, two women - one with carbon monoxide poisoning, and the other with high blood pressure - were sent to the hospital. Later, two firefighters were taken to the hospital - a piece of roof fell on one, and the other suffered smoke inhalation.

Meanwhile, in the crowd of journalists gathered in front of the facade, people quickly recovered from the shock and began to exchange the latest news, showing a completely professional interest in them. They mainly discussed laptops and photographic equipment left in the editorial offices, which will now become prey for looters. Much attention was also paid to the art gallery, which one of the deputy editors-in-chief assembled in his office.

Meanwhile, due to the fact that at first there was weak water pressure in the hydrants, firefighters missed the fire - through wooden floors, ventilation ducts clogged with dust and flammable carpet, it spread to the entire sixth floor and spread to all three wings of the building. After the roof was dismantled, the wooden rafters began to work and the entire upper part of the building began to flare up like a giant candle. Firefighters poured hundreds of tons of water onto the roof from a dozen barrels, but this only intensified the fire. At least that's what it seemed like from below. Towards evening, the eighth, technical floor collapsed into the dining room, and then all of this together began to collapse on the sixth, into the offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda.

When the fire finally died down at about eight o'clock in the evening, the entire upper part of the building was reduced to charred ruins, and the lower five floors were reduced to a huge ice stele dusted with snow. The streets around the complex, along which seething streams of muddy water rushed all day, were accordingly covered with a thick ice crust, and the surrounding houses were covered with frost.

The editorial office of Komsomolskaya Pravda suffered the most, which is generally not surprising. According to firefighters, it was in Komsomolskaya Pravda that the source of the fire was located. This most likely happened in the editorial library or photo archive, located just under the dining room. “From July 1 last year, smoking was prohibited in our building by order of the administration,” one of the KP journalists told Kommersant. “Even in the toilets. As a result, all smokers had to go outside. And when the frost hit, people began to find different secluded corners, where you can slowly smoke. Perhaps someone decided to do this in an empty library, full of paper, and forgot an unextinguished cigarette there.”

Other journalists believe that the building was ruined by the typical Moscow “Voronya Slobodka syndrome” - in an old building with dilapidated wiring, there were too many tenants who used energy-intensive equipment: computers, air conditioners, heaters, etc. The networks could not stand it and a short circuit occurred.

“The operational-investigative group will begin examining the scene of the incident after the firefighters have finished their work,” said Anatoly Vasiliev, prosecutor of the Savelovsk Interdistrict Prosecutor’s Office. So far, according to him, a criminal case has been opened under the article “destruction or damage to someone else’s property through negligence.” “A criminal case has been initiated under this article, based on the information we have,” said prosecutor Vasilyev. “Careless actions with both fire and electrical appliances could have led to a fire and major damage. The emergency could also have occurred as a result of improper execution by the relevant officials of their official duties."

“We know only one version of the fire - the electrical panel caught fire,” Andrei Dyatlov, first deputy editor-in-chief of Komsomolskaya Pravda, told Kommersant. “And a criminal case for careless handling of fire in such cases is opened automatically. The fire inspectorate regularly carried out fire inspections in the building inspections, but I don’t know about any violations or orders identified.”

The head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Sergei Shoigu, had no questions about the actions of his subordinates. Firefighters, he said, arrived on time - 11 minutes after the fire was signaled. “In a matter of minutes, 11 people were rescued from the upper floors using a retractable ladder,” said Mr. Shoigu. “I have only big complaints about Mosvodokanal, which was unable to provide the necessary water pressure in the fire hoses in these cases.” It was this circumstance, the minister believes, that prevented firefighters from quickly dealing with the fire.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who visited the scene, said that the burned building would be restored. “This object is a historical monument, of course, it will be restored,” said the mayor. “There is a need to return it to its original appearance. But the building will need to be seriously shaken up - replacing wooden floors with reinforced concrete ones.”

At the same time, the mayor could not even give an approximate time frame for the start of restoration work. Although the first repairmen will begin working in the building immediately after firefighters and investigators from the prosecutor’s office leave, they will also have to fight ice using heat guns.

“The Moscow government and the federal government have already offered several sites for the temporary location of the editorial office,” noted Mr. Dyatlov. “One of them is in the area of the Baumanskaya metro station. Colleagues also responded - Rossiyskaya Gazeta offered a floor, Express Gazeta warmed up Today".

“Our photo service and library burned down - there were files of newspapers, as well as valuable documents - for example, protocols of the Trotskyist trials,” Mr. Dyatlov assessed the damage caused by the fire without delay. “The electronic archive of the newspaper for 12 years also burned down. The biggest loss for employees - their passports and other documents that remained in the burning building. The external server, unlike the internal one, was not damaged - it is from it that we send the issue to print, it also supports the operation of the site. The newspaper will be published - the Moscow issue in a truncated version of 16 pages. "The banding will be different in the regions."

Mr. Dyatlov claims that the editorial office’s property was insured, and KP is going to begin calculating losses today.

“The fact that we will come out is already certain. But we haven’t yet decided where and how we will go out. Many of our colleagues are offering us help,” said Tribuna’s first deputy editor-in-chief, chief editor Dmitry Lysenkov. According to him, the newspaper's management cannot enter its premises to assess the damage. “We can definitely say that the majority of our office equipment was either destroyed by fire or rendered inoperable by the water that flooded all the premises while extinguishing the fire,” said Mr. Lysenkov.

The editors hope that newspaper publication will be restored to normal in the near future. Press distributors believe that the reduction in the number of pages will not affect sales. “Sales will not fall, but rather will increase - the reader will buy the newspaper at least out of curiosity, and the reduction of pages will not stop him,” says Aleksey Karaganov, deputy general director for distribution development of JSC Publishing House Argumenty i Fakty. “Any catastrophe or just an emergency always increases sales daily press - for example, after the events of September 11, sales of daily newspapers increased several times."

SERGEY Ъ-DYUPIN

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 26 dated February 14, 2006, page 1

Authors:

Sergey Dupin

Themes:

Fires in Russia

"Komsomolskaya Pravda" went bankrupt