Grandmother cries every minute

In Magnitogorsk, rescuers disassemble the blockages of a residential building that collapsed on December 31. Reporting Eugene Berg

In the early morning of December 31, in a ten -story residential building on Karl Marx Avenue in Magnitogorsk, household gas exploded. One of the entrances as a result fell almost entirely - as of the evening of January 1, it was reported about nine dead; The fate of several dozen people is unknown, rescuers continue to disassemble the rubble. At the request of Medusa, Yevgeny Berg spent New Year's Eve and January 1, 2019 at the destroyed house and at the headquarters of assistance to victims in Magnitogorsk.

The construction crane lowers a large red claw into a pile of concrete and pulls out several blocks from the blockage - they crumble, scattering dust around. A long piece of reinforcement sticks out of one block, at the end of which a brown bedspread for the bed dangles. The tap turns-the coverlet flutters, as if it were someone's cloak.

On the street - minus 20, the wind blows. Half an hour remains before the New Year. In the 127th Magnitogorsk microdistrict, only a few people are facing a police cordon, behind which a crane operates and dozens of employees of the Ministry of Emergencies are fussing. Flights highlight a gaping hole in a long ten -story building. Red claw dumps garbage into the KAMAZ body. Two rescuers study the contents while others carefully examine the five -meter pile of concrete remaining from the collapsed entrance. They are looking for people - living or dead.

The explosion in the seventh entrance of the residential building on Karl Marx Avenue occurred on December 31 at six in the morning local time. According to the main version of the investigation, household gas exploded in one of the apartments; As a result, the left section of the entrance was completely hit - from the third to the tenth floor (instead of the first two there was an arch). The right section collapsed partially - there are torn concrete floors and window frames of glazed loggias there and now. In total, 26 apartments were destroyed, in which, according to the Ministry of Emergencies, 46 people lived (110 residents were registered in the entire entrance, according to official information).

The crane takes the garbage over and over again - in front of the destroyed house there is a turn of KamAZ, and as soon as the red claw fills the body of one of them, he departs, giving way to another. The elderly woman who approached the cordon asks the policeman where the impromptu memorial to the dead is located. He points to the yard - and asks: "Light the candles, otherwise the last light has already remained."

New Year has come twenty minutes ago. Fireworks are coming from neighboring areas. In the 127th Magnitogorsk microdistrict, it is very cold and quiet.

"There the brain did not work at all"

Around five in the morning on December 31, Natalia, who lived in the fifth entrance of the house on Karl Marx, woke the dog. “She rushed around the apartment, I thought - she wants to be walked,” the woman recalls. - I brought her out, but we returned home, and she was still nervous. I don’t know, maybe she felt. ” Natalia went to bed again - but did not have time to doze off, as a noise and roar rang out: her apartment shook, photographs began to fall from the walls.

At 6:03, Natalia called an emergency service, ran out into the street and saw that part of the house collapsed. On the third and ninth floors, a fire began, in the shaft of the elevator, which was visible from the street, something sparkled. Other people began to run to the house - some of them, as Natalya recalls, climbed up the blockage to help the residents of half -destroyed apartments.

“I also ran upstairs, pulled out two children, handed it around,” says Natalia. She did not think about her own safety: "There the brain did not work at all." Near the rubble, the woman eventually spent the entire New Year's day - and only in the evening she left for relatives to return back to her apartment in a dilapidated house at night: otherwise "the heart was not in place." She was not alone - on the night of January 1, windows were burning in a ten -story building.

The next day, several dozen residents of Magnitogorsk gathered in the courtyard of the house. Many brought flowers, candles, children's toys - they were left right in the snow before a cordon. A 50-year-old woman stood at the new memorial and cried: her whole life passed in this ten-story building, and classmates lived in the collapsed entrance.

Nearby, a woman in a red knitted hat convinced a middle -aged man that gas could not explode like that. “I have a military husband, he ran out into the street immediately after the explosion-we live in that house-and says that there are no such collapse from gas,” she said. - Or do you think Putin and Bastrykin just arrived? (Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Russia Alexander Bastrykin and Russian President Vladimir Putin flew to Magnitogorsk on December 31 - approx. Medusa) . This is definitely a terrorist attack. In addition, this is a dysfunctional house - all sorts of Tajiks rent many apartments. How do we know that they are not recruited by ISIS? " The interlocutor of the woman shook her head doubtfully. The investigation does not consider the version of the attack; In the Main Magnitogorsk VK community, dozens of likes gained comments, the authors of which were sure that the authorities were hiding the exact number of dead and the true cause of the explosion (now most of them are removed).

The crane with the claw at that moment stood immovably-rescuers stopped work for several hours due to the threat of collapse of the wall remaining after the explosion; Only about eight in the evening January 1 began to disassemble the rubble again. Residents of the sixth and eighth entrance were evacuated the day before at night - some of them were now trying to get home. One woman complained to someone on the phone, which could not feed the cat in the apartment, the other wanted to pick up her things; The police did not let anyone into the house.

On January 1, they began to evacuate Natalia's entrance. She took several large bags with things with her - and stood with them on the street in anticipation of her neighbors. A keyboard synthesizer stuck out of one bag.

"The whole city can be fed"

By the evening of January 1, the Ministry of Emergencies reported nine dead whose bodies were removed from under the rubble. Six more people managed to save, they are in serious condition; Among them is a 11-month-old boy who was found a day after collapse, hearing his cry. “[The child] lay on linoleum, on the mattress, in body and diapers, and from below where there were legs, a blanket gathered, he was wrapped,” rescuer Peter Gritsenko told reporters. Now the child is in serious condition; He was taken away by special brittle to the hospital in Moscow.

After a report of the explosion, volunteers on social networks proposed placing injured families at home; The regional authorities also promised to provide the victims of the collapse of housing. However, as Meduza was told in the volunteer headquarters (it was deployed at school No. 14, a five -minute walk from the collapsed ten -story buildings), only three people turned to accommodation. Much more people came for humanitarian aid, which the inhabitants of Magnitogorsk bring to the headquarters, - as an employee of the city administration, leading the work of volunteers, Tatyana Ptitsina, said, in half a day on January 1, several dozen people turned to the work, warm clothes and other primary things. For cigarettes at the headquarters - a separate container.

Pultitsina says that 200 volunteers have been working in the headquarters on December 31-from schoolchildren to pensioners: someone has already collaborated with city volunteer organizations, others simply responded to the headquarters in social networks and helped, in particular, spelled apartments in the house in Karl Marx, where people remained. Some of the volunteers - along with the rescuers who worked out the shift on the analysis of the rubble - spent New Year's Eve at school. At midnight working in the dining room of the cook distributed tangerines to all.

Maxim Salnikov said that he arrived at the headquarters on the morning of December 31, as soon as he found out about the explosion. He shows on the phone photos of school rooms littered with clothes with clothes, hygiene products, charger, food. “Someone brought huge packages,” he says, “someone is very little. I saw how one grandmother brought a banana, so she has one, she gave him away. Now there are so many things here - probably, the whole city can be fed. ”

Despite the fact that both the city hall and the volunteers themselves closed the reception of humanitarian aid on the evening of December 31, the city residents brought food and things throughout January 1. The headquarters will continue to work on the following days.

"The feeling that all this is a dream"

In the evening on the day of the explosion, the operational headquarters of the Ministry of Emergencies distributed a list of missing residents of the exploding house - it had 45 people; Some of them got in touch on January 1. One of them-26-year-old Christina Nagaeva-lived with her grandmother on the third floor of a collapsed entrance, in the right section, which did not fall completely. The girl left for the New Year holidays in Chelyabinsk - and in the apartment at the time of the explosion there was only a grandmother.

“My phone was torn from nine in the morning [January 1], my friends called and wrote in all networks,” says Nagaeva. - I went to the first link [on the Internet] and immediately began to recruit to my parents, but they had “not a subscriber” phones. She got through to her sister, she said that her grandmother was taken to the hospital. An hour later, dad called, said that everything was fine, and the Ministry of Emergencies’s grandmother was pulled out of the apartment on the roof of the store ( several grocery supermarkets were attached to the first floor of the house - approx. Medusa ). In our section, only one -room apartment collapsed, and ours - neighboring. Roughly speaking, the collapse ended in our apartment. ” According to Nagaeva, the doctors did not reveal any serious injuries from her grandmother. “She at 5:30 [December 31] called [my] mother and brutally shouted that everything collapses and explodes,” the girl continues. “Now the grandmother is crying every minute.”

The explosion knocked out all the door jambs and several windows in the Nagaev’s apartment, the girl’s room was “littered with bricks”; Only the room in which the grandmother was in was not injured. It is impossible to get there - the stairwell is destroyed. Nagaeva says that neither she nor her parents know what to do next; They wait for the blockages to be disassembled and information about neighbors will appear, who have not yet contacted. The Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region Boris Dubrovsky said that the regional authoritieswould pay 50 thousand rubles to the victims of the explosion, the families of the dead - 100 thousand each, and also promised that the authorities would relocate those who were left without an apartment.

“The feeling is a dream. And all is not true, ”says Nagaeva. “Until I see the house with my own eyes, I won’t believe it.”

January 2 in the Chelyabinsk region announced the day of mourning. The fate of 34 people living in the destroyed entrance is still unknown.

Evgeny Berg , Magnitogorsk