Translated material
Deadly redevelopment
Due to the fire at the plant, all industrial facilities in the Greater Urals will be inspected
The fire at the Yekaterinburg plant "Agrospetsmontazh" will cause large-scale inspections of all industrial facilities in the Greater Urals. The reason is the scale of the tragedy. On the afternoon of February 6, not just a furniture production workshop, but an entire floor of the plant building caught fire, the number of people burned alive reached 12, and the number of victims is generally believed to be in the dozens.The fire started around three o'clock in the afternoon. According to the preliminary version, the cause of the fire was static electricity in the furniture shop - when pouring varnishes, a flame broke out and quickly spread to bales of fabric, furniture and foam rubber that lined the passages in the building. The director of the furniture center, Marina Nagaeva, recalls how at first the computers went out, the electricity went out and there was a smell of smoke. Panic began in the premises.
Firefighters arrived almost immediately, but were unable to begin extinguishing the fire - the fire quickly spread along the entire perimeter of the building and did not allow rescuers to begin working. Since the fire was assigned the highest category of complexity, more than twenty fire crews went to Agrospetsmontazh. For an hour and a half they poured fire, watched as workers jumped out of the windows of the upper floors onto the street, broke their legs, and could not help. By this time, the second floor was already engulfed in fire. The total area of the fire reached one and a half thousand square meters.
By Wednesday morning, the fire was extinguished, but rescuers did not yet have accurate data on the number of victims. It was previously established that there were 85 people in the building. Ten women were officially hospitalized, eleven received assistance on the spot, and twelve were considered burned. Four are listed as missing. On Wednesday, the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation for the Sverdlovsk Region opened a 24-hour hotline, whose specialists reported data on the dead and the location of the injured.
Doctors assess the condition of the women admitted to hospital No. 24 as moderate. Difficulties in treatment are associated with numerous fractures of patients: since factory employees escaped from the fire by jumping out of windows, many ended up in hospital beds with spinal injuries, broken arms and legs.
The Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation for the Ural Federal District took the investigation into the causes of the fire under personal control. The Chkalovsky District Prosecutor's Office of Yekaterinburg opened a criminal case under Art. 219 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of fire safety rules resulting in the death of two or more persons). Investigators are already interested in how the company received permission from firefighters to work if it did not have evacuation plans in case of fire, and the exits were filled with paints and foam rubber. The leadership of the regional department of the Ministry of Emergency Situations abdicated all responsibility. Deputy head of the department Vladimir Agapitov said that the building was inspected in 2004 and no violations were found. To prevent such fires from happening again, the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations for the Sverdlovsk Region is organizing mass inspections of production and storage facilities.
Now the main suspects have become the tenants of the premises - the owners of that same ill-fated furniture factory, whose names have not yet been disclosed. It turned out that they were the ones who carried out the redevelopment of the building, which was not formalized anywhere.