Translated material
Smoke of students
The cause of the fire at Moscow State University could have been arson
Two people were killed and seven were burned as a result of a fire that occurred early Friday morning in one of the dormitories of Moscow State University. Lomonosov. The alarm was raised at half past five in the morning by students who were studying at their computers that night. Hearing the fire alarm go off and noticing smoke in the corridor of the 12th floor of Building B, the guys ran from room to room, waking up their classmates. Firefighters arrived at MSU eight minutes after receiving the signal and evacuated about 1,000 people from the burning building.The fire was brought under control by seven o'clock in the morning. The fire area was 250 square meters. m. Investigators from the State Fire Supervision Service and the prosecutor’s office of the Western District of the capital immediately began inspecting the scene of the emergency, which opened a criminal case on the fact of “careless handling of fire, resulting in the death of two or more persons.” The first version was the short circuit of the electrical wiring. However, then the Ministry of Emergency Situations clarified: it is possible that the dormitory was set on fire.
The State Fire Service control panel received a message about a fire in building No. 1 of building B of the main building of Moscow State University on Vorobyovy Gory on Friday at 5.26. The first, according to the entry in the log, to arrive at the scene of the emergency were employees of fire station No. 121, based at Moscow State University, and employees of the local police department, who, together with the floor duty officers, began evacuating students. A total of 30 fire brigades took part in the fire extinguishing operation. The fire was immediately assigned the third complexity number on a five-point scale.
As experts later found out, the fire arose on the 12th floor in the center of the T-shaped corridor and immediately spread in three directions, cutting off people’s escape routes. Near the source of the fire, 125 students and graduate students of the faculties of physics and chemistry lived. They saved themselves as best they could. The inhabitants of the lower floors managed to go down the stairs. Rescuers rescued 119 people from the 12th floor. According to eyewitnesses, the corridors were heavily smoky and students made their way to the exit with wet towels over their heads. Firefighters gave fire victims their own gas masks and masks. Those who were unable to descend managed to climb to the roof of this wing of the main building - they were later removed by specialists from the sixth search and rescue squad of Moscow. But not everyone was saved: in the corridor of the 12th floor near the elevator, two badly burnt bodies were found: a man and a woman.
According to preliminary data, those who died at Moscow State University, who have not yet been officially identified, were poisoned by carbon monoxide. Eyewitnesses suggest that this is a physics student and a female graduate student. Seven more students suffered from burns and carbon monoxide. Two refused hospitalization, four - Kristina Prishvina (19 years old), Elena Livantseva (19 years old), Vladislav Bashkirov (20 years old) and Nikolai Khrapov (21 years old) - were taken to the clinic of the Research Institute of Emergency Medicine named after. Sklifosovsky. The most serious injuries - burns to the upper respiratory tract and face - were suffered by 20-year-old Sergei Novikov. He was hospitalized at the 36th Clinical Hospital.
Already on Friday evening, most of the students returned to their rooms, and the fire victims were temporarily moved in with their friends. University rector Viktor Sadovnichy said: “Meals have been organized, the children have been given warm clothes, and they are also provided with psychological assistance.”
On Friday, employees of the fire testing laboratory, criminologists and the investigative team of the prosecutor's office of the UAB began inspecting the scene of the emergency. But despite the fact that three days have already passed since the tragedy at Moscow State University, investigators still did not give a clear picture of what happened yesterday. According to the chief state fire inspector of Moscow, Viktor Klimkin, who supervised the fire extinguishing, during the investigation, investigators discovered two fires: in the central elevator hall on the 12th floor (electrical wiring or a household appliance could have caught fire there) and on the 14th floor in the fire closet. The Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Moscow clarified that someone threw a burning object into the closet. Whether it was intentional or not will be determined by the investigation.
According to university officials, owners of homemade heating devices and smokers may be to blame. The fire victims themselves believe that the cause of the fire was a short circuit in the electrical wiring, which in the old dormitories of Moscow State University does not meet safety requirements.