Railway accident near Ufa. The largest railway accident in the USSR near the city of Ashoy

UFA, June 4 - RIA Novosti, Ramilya Salikhova. It was the ambulance doctors who did the main job of rescuing the passengers of the Adler-Novosibirsk and Novosibirsk-Adler trains, who, on the night of June 4, 1989, fell into a fire trap in a lowland near Ufa, where a gas pipeline exploded. There were no rescuers from the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Russia then, and there were no states with that name either.

Fatal set of circumstances

The tragedy occurred at the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway on the territory of the Iglinsky district of Bashkiria on the stretch between the stations Asha (Chelyabinsk region) and Uglu-Telyak (Bashkiria). By the time the trains appeared, a huge cloud of gas had accumulated here, which leaked from the damaged Western Siberia-Urals-Volga region gas pipeline, located 900 meters from the railway. The terrain turned out to be such that the liquid gas that came out of the pipe, evaporated and accumulated near the surface of the earth, "stacked" precisely in the direction of the railway track - into the lowland.

The explosion occurred at the moment when two trains entered the gas cloud at once, which had never before met at this point.

The explosion occurred at 01.15 Bashkir time (23.15 Moscow time) and, according to experts, the explosion was only seven times weaker than the explosion of the American atomic bomb in Hiroshima in 1945.

The front of the rising flame was about 1.5-2 kilometers, the fire covered 250 hectares. According to rescuers, from a helicopter, the crash site looked like a scorched circle with a diameter of about a kilometer. According to experts, a short-term rise in temperature in the area of the explosion exceeded 1,000 degrees Celsius.

The explosion destroyed 37 cars and both electric locomotives, seven cars burned down completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 were torn off the train and thrown off the tracks by a blast wave.

According to the documents, there were 1,284 passengers on both trains, including 383 children, and 86 members of train and locomotive crews. Apparently, there were more passengers, as the trains were overcrowded with vacationers. In addition, among the passengers were children under 5 years old, for whom tickets were not issued. In cases where the whole family died, it was not possible to find out the exact number of dead family members.

According to official data, 258 dead were found at the crash site, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals - as a result, the number of victims of the tragedy increased to 575. However, 675 names are engraved on the memorial at the crash site, and according to According to unofficial data, about 780 people died.

Doctors' response saved hundreds of lives

Mikhail Kalinin, 57, a senior ambulance doctor in Ufa, who is still working in this position, claims that he does not like to remember the events of those days, but he made an exception for RIA Novosti.

Mikhail Kalinin remembers that the first call about this tragedy came at 01.45 from the dispatcher at the Ulu-Telyak station, 100 kilometers from Ufa. He said that the train car was on fire.

“I immediately made an additional call to the dispatcher at the Ufa railway station, eight minutes later I sent 53 ambulance teams to the torch. Because there was no exact address of the scene. And I sent them in turn, and not all together. was done so that doctors could keep in touch with each other and with me," says Kalinin.

The radios at that time were weak, it was difficult to contact the doctors who went to the scene. It was especially hard for the doctors who were the first to arrive at the crash site.

"The first to arrive were Yuri Furtsev, orderly Cherny and cardiologist Valery Sayfutdinov," recalls the senior ambulance doctor.

The resuscitator Furtsev, who still works on the ambulance, remembers what he saw first at the crash site. “There was no road, and the rescuers made their way to the epicenter of the explosion on foot. And when they arrived, they saw wrecked wagons, burnt wood and burnt people,” he recalls.

Eyewitnesses told terrible things: when the explosion occurred, people burned like matches.

“It’s very hard to remember this, I don’t know how, but then we apparently worked on automatic, immediately organized the delivery of people to the district hospital. The first three ambulance teams from Ufa were like reconnaissance ones, a hundred ambulances immediately left help," says Furtsev.

According to him, if it were not for the immediate reaction of doctors and local residents, there would have been much more victims.

Everything was missing

The senior ambulance doctor Mikhail Kalinin recalls how literally everything was lacking: people, cars, medicines.

"That night it was difficult to find people. It happened on the night from Saturday to Sunday, many were at their dachas," says Kalinin.

All ambulance teams of the city were involved. Only seven cars were left for city calls. "On the night of 3 to 4, we turned down 456 calls to the ambulance, we went only to traffic accidents," he recalls.

Kalinin notes that the doctors used their forces and means very rationally that night. This is what helped them cope with the difficult task of transporting the victims.

“Together with the Minister of Health Alfred Turyanov, we decided to involve a helicopter school for the fastest transportation of victims from the outbreak from the accident site. hotel "Arena". This place was not chosen by chance. It was from the square behind the hotel to all the hospitals where we delivered people, there was the shortest way to all medical institutions, to one hospital for forty seconds, to the second one and a half minutes, and to the third - two and a half minutes drive. Thanks to the traffic police service, which helped organize unimpeded passage for ambulances, blocked the city highway to access this organized helipad. Additional transport was brought in - taxis and buses, "says Kalinin.

According to him, the medicines ran out almost immediately after receiving the first patients. “The fact that it was summer and people didn’t freeze saved us then. Ramil Zainullin, the deputy chief physician of the ambulance, who arrived at the workplace, opened warehouses with potent drugs, and all the victims received painkillers almost at the scene. It helped that the warehouses Civil Defense had a sufficient amount of stretchers and dressings," Kalinin said.

Medical alarm

“On the morning of June 4, the head of the health department of the city of Ufa, Dimi Chanyshev, turned on the radio to the medical community of the city with a request to go to work. It was Sunday, and only doctors and orderlies on duty remained in the hospitals,” recalls Kalinin.

According to him, everyone who could, even polyclinics, came out. Each victim needed the help of not one, but several specialists. Three days later, it was decided to send a certain number of people to burn hospitals in other cities. Arranged flights from Ufa to Moscow, Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod), Samara, Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg), Leningrad. The injured on the road were accompanied by ambulance doctors, even if they were already working outside their shift.

All were taken alive. "Thanks to all the doctors. No one had to repeat requests and orders twice that night, everyone understood each other perfectly, everyone was engulfed in the thought - to save people, every person," the doctor recalls with excitement.

“I was 37 years old then. I went to work fair-haired, and returned gray-haired. During the night, not only my head turned white. After the tragedy, we could not talk about this disaster for some time, it was so scary. God forbid to see such a human tragedy," he said.

And then what?

All participants in the rescue operation, ambulance doctors were awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples. 18 ambulance workers received the title of "Excellent Health Worker of the USSR".

After the tragedy near Ufa, passenger cars began to be made from other, less combustible and more heat and fire resistant materials.

And in Ufa, in the 18th city hospital, there is a "department of medical disasters." On it, as in other medical universities in Russia, future doctors are taught a life-saving course according to the "Kalinin method." The course was based on his reaction to the tragedy - the fact that he, without consulting with anyone, decided to send one hundred ambulance teams to the scene of the tragedy.

Original taken from Schnause at age 25. June 4, 1989 Catastrophe in Chelyabinsk.

June 4, 2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the catastrophe on the railway transport, monstrous in scale and in terms of victims. The disaster on the stretch Asha - Ulu Telyak is the largest disaster in the history of Russia and the USSR that occurred on June 4, 1989, 11 km from the city of Asha. At the time of the passage of two passenger trains, there was a powerful explosion of an unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture formed as a result of an accident on the Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline passing nearby. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), more than 600 were injured.

The disaster is considered the largest in the history of the USSR and Russia.

In trains No. 211 Novosibirsk-Adler (20 cars) and No. 212 Adler-Novosibirsk (18 cars) there were 1284 passengers, including 383 children and 86 people of train and locomotive crews.

The train from Novosibirsk was late that night for technical reasons, and shortly before the tragedy, the oncoming train stopped at an intermediate station for an urgent disembarkation - a woman went into labor right in the car.

Significant passengers on their way to Adler were already looking forward to a quiet vacation at sea. They were going to meet those who, on the contrary, were already returning from vacation. The explosion that took place in the middle of the night is estimated by experts as equivalent to an explosion of three hundred tons of TNT. According to unofficial data, the power of the explosion in Ulu-Telyak was approximately the same as in Hiroshima - about 12 kilotons.

The explosion destroyed 38 wagons and two electric locomotives. 11 wagons were thrown off the tracks by the shock wave, of which 7 were completely burned out. The remaining 26 wagons were burned on the outside and burned out inside. Centuries-old trees were felled within a radius of three kilometers around the epicenter.

350 meters of railway lines and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion covered an area of about 250 hectares. Later, the investigation will find out that the root cause of the gas leak and the explosion was poor-quality welding of the gas pipeline. The result is a breach of the tightness of the seams. The gas is heavier than air, and there is a big low in this place. An explosive mixture formed and the trains entered a completely gassed zone, where there was quite a small spark for a powerful explosion.

In the course of operation in the period from 1985 to 1989, 50 major accidents and failures occurred on the product pipeline, which, however, did not lead to human casualties. After the accident near Ufa, the product pipeline was not restored and was liquidated.

Memoirs of an eyewitness.

An explosion of a large volume of gas distributed in space had the character of a volumetric explosion. The power of the explosion was estimated at 300 tons of TNT. According to other estimates, the power of a volumetric explosion could reach 10 kilotons of TNT, which is comparable to the power of a nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (12.5 kilotons). The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave shattered windows in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene. The column of flame was visible for more than 100 km. 350 meters of railway lines and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion covered an area of about 250 hectares.

The official version claims that a gas leak from the product pipeline became possible due to damage caused to it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak started 40 minutes before the explosion.

According to another version, the cause of the accident was the corrosive effect on the outer part of the pipe of electric leakage currents, the so-called "stray currents" of the railway. 2-3 weeks before the explosion, a micro fistula formed, then, as a result of cooling of the pipe, a crack growing in length appeared at the place of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without going outside, and gradually descended down the slope to the railway.

When two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark arose, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of the gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.

It has already been 22 years since that monstrous catastrophe near Ulu-Telyak happened. More than 600 people died. And how many people were left crippled? Many have remained missing. The real culprits of this disaster have not been found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “switchmen” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not the carelessness and negligence that we encountered then. The drivers reported that there was a strong smell of gas, but no action was taken. We should not forget about this tragedy, about the pain that people endured... Until now, we are notified every day about one or another sad incident. Where more than 600 lives were interrupted by chance. For their relatives and friends, this place on the land of Bashkortostan is the 1710th kilometer by rail ...

In addition, I give excerpts from Soviet newspapers that wrote about the disaster at that time:

From the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Council of Ministers of the USSR On June 3 at 23:14 Moscow time, a gas leak occurred as a result of an accident on the liquefied gas product pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa railway section. During the passage of two oncoming passenger trains with the destination Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk, a large explosion and fire occurred. There are numerous victims.

At about 11:10 p.m. Moscow time, one of the drivers radioed that they had entered a heavily polluted area. After that, the connection was cut off ... As we now know, after that there was an explosion. His strength was such that all the windows on the central estate of the collective farm "Red Sunrise" flew out. And this is a few kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. We also saw a heavy wheeled pair, which found itself in an instant in the forest at a distance of more than five hundred meters from the railway. The rails twisted into unimaginable loops. And then what about the people. A lot of people died. From some, only a pile of ashes remained. It is difficult to write about this, but the train to Adler included two carriages with children going to the pioneer camp. Most of them burned down.

Disaster on the Trans-Siberian.

Here is what the Izvestia correspondent was told at the Ministry of Railways: The pipeline on which the disaster occurred runs about a kilometer from the Ufa-Chelyabinsk highway (Kuibyshev railway). At the time of the explosion and the resulting fire, passenger trains 211 (Novosibirsk-Adler) and 212 (Adler-Novosibirsk) were moving towards each other. The impact of the blast wave and flame threw fourteen wagons off the track, destroyed the contact network, damaged communication lines and the railway track for several hundred meters. The fire spread to the trains, and the fire was put out within a few hours. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a rupture of the Western Siberia-Ural pipeline near the Asha railway station. Raw materials for the chemical plants of Kuibyshev are distilled through it. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria ... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the accident site, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline runs through the mountains. For a certain time, the gas accumulated in two deep hollows and, for unknown reasons, exploded. The front of the rising flame was about one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbons that had collected at the rupture site had burned out. It turned out that long before the explosion, residents of nearby settlements felt a strong smell of gas in the air. It spread over a distance of approximately 4 to 8 kilometers. Such reports were received from the population around 21:00 local time, and the tragedy, as you know, occurred later. However, instead of finding and eliminating the leak, someone (while the investigation is ongoing) added pressure to the pipeline and the gas continued to spread through the hollows.

An explosion on a summer night.

As a result of the leak, the gas gradually accumulated in the hollow, its concentration increased. Experts believe that the cargo and passenger trains passing alternately with a powerful air flow paved a “corridor” that was safe for themselves, and the trouble was pushed aside. According to this version, it might have moved away this time as well, since the trains "Novosibirsk - Adler" and "Adler - Novosibirsk" were not supposed to meet on this section according to the railway schedule. But by a tragic accident, on the train to Adler, one of the women went into premature labor. The doctors who were among the passengers gave her first aid. At the nearest station, the train was delayed for 15 minutes in order to transfer the mother and child to the called ambulance. And when the fateful meeting took place in a polluted area, the "corridor effect" did not work. To ignite the explosive mixture, a tiny spark from under the wheels thrown out the window of a smoldering cigarette or a lit match was enough.

On June 6, a meeting of the government commission headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR GG Vedernikov took place in the government commission in Ufa. Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the commission on urgent measures to provide assistance to the victims of the disaster on the railway. He said that at 7 am on June 6, 503 of the wounded, including 115 children, were in medical facilities in Ufa, 299 people are in serious condition. In medical institutions of Chelyabinsk - 149 victims, including 40 children, 299 people are in serious condition. As was reported at the meeting, according to preliminary data, about 1,200 people were on both trains at the time of the accident. It is still difficult to give a more accurate figure, due to the fact that the number of children under the age of five traveling on trains, for whom, according to the current regulation, railway tickets were not purchased, and possible passengers who also did not purchase tickets, is unknown.

This is what a cold news bulletin sounds like.

The weather was windless. The gas escaping from above filled the entire lowland. The driver of the freight train, who shortly before the explosion proceeded to the 1710th kilometer, transmitted by communication that there was a strong gas contamination in this place. He was promised to...

On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak near the Zmeina Gorka, the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Flames filled everything around. The very air became fire. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the zone of intense burning. The tail cars of both trains were thrown out of the track. At the trailer "zero" car, the roof was torn off by an explosive wave, those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto the embankment.

The clock found on the ashes showed 1.10 local time.

A giant flash was seen for tens of kilometers

Until now, the mystery of this terrible catastrophe worries astrologers, scientists, and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met in a dangerous place where a product pipeline leaked? Why was there a spark? Why did the trains get into the heat, the most crowded with people in the summer, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer from the leak? Until now, the number of dead is not known for certain - in the cars in Soviet times, when the names were not put on the tickets, there could be a huge number of "hares" traveling to the blessed south and returning back.

Flames shot up into the sky, it became bright as day, we thought we had dropped an atomic bomb, - says the district police officer of the Iglinsky police department, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod Anatoly Bezrukov. - They rushed to the conflagration in cars, on tractors. Equipment on a steep slope could not climb. They began to climb the slope - all around the pines stand like burnt matches. Below they saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies ... One woman hung on a birch tree with her stomach open. An old man crawled along the slope from the fiery mess, coughing. How many years have passed, and he still stands before my eyes. Then I saw that the man was burning like gas with a blue flame.

At one in the morning, teenagers returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves among the hissing metal helped along with the adults.

We tried to take out the children in the first place, - says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. - Adults were simply dragged away from the fire. And they moan, cry, ask to cover with something. What will you hide? They took off their clothes.

The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windbreak, looking for them by groans and screams.

They took a person by the arms, by the legs, and his skin remained in his hands ... - said the driver of the Ural, Viktor Titlin, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - All night, until the morning, they took the victims to the hospital in Asha.

The driver of the state farm bus, Marat Sharifullin, made three trips, and then began to shout: “I won’t go any more, I bring only corpses!” On the way, the children screamed, asked for water, burned skin stuck to the seats, many did not survive the road.

Cars did not go uphill, they had to carry the wounded on themselves, ”says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - Carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, such a healthy man, endured thirty people. All in blood, but did not stop.

Sergey Stolyarov made three trips on an electric locomotive with wounded people. At the Ulu-Telyak station, he, a driver with two months of experience, missed the 212th ambulance, went on a freight train after him. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned wagons. On the embankment, the wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burnt people into the cab, Stolyarov moved to the siding, returned to the crash site with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless, and loaded, loaded ... He returned home - his shirt stood like a stake from someone else's dried blood.

All the village equipment came, they were transported on tractors, - recalled the chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm, Sergei Kosmakov. - The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children bandaged ...

Specialized assistance came much later - after one and a half to two hours.

At 1.45 a.m., a call came to the console that a wagon was on fire near Ulu-Telyak,” says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in Ufa. - Ten minutes later, they clarified: the entire train burned out. They removed all the ambulances on duty from the line, equipped them with gas masks. No one knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. The cars just went to the torch ...

We got out of the car to the ashes, the first thing we see is a doll and a severed leg ... - said the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. - How many anesthetic injections had to be done - the mind is incomprehensible. When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. The baby's mother and father both died. There were no seats in the car, I put the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair curled into caked rings - like a lamb, and she smelled like a roast lamb ... I still can’t forget this girl. On the way she told me that her name was Jeanne and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age at the time. Now Zhanna should be already 21, quite a bride ...

Zhanna, who was taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev, we found. In the book of memory. Akhmadeeva Zhanna Floridovna, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three, she died in the Children's Republican Hospital in Ufa.

Trees fell like in a vacuum

The place of the tragedy smelled sharply of a putrid smell. The wagons, for some reason rusty in color, lay a few meters from the tracks, bizarrely flattened and curved. It’s even hard to imagine what temperature could make iron wriggle like that. It is amazing that in this fire, on the ground that turned into coke, where electrical poles and sleepers were uprooted, people could still remain alive!

The military later determined that the power of the explosion was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half of the atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima,” said Sergey Kosmakov, chairman of the Krasny Voskhod village council. - We ran to the place of the explosion - the trees fell, as if in a vacuum - to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so strong that windows were shattered in all houses within a radius of 12 kilometers. Pieces from the wagons we found at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.

Patients were brought in dump trucks, side by side in trucks: alive, unconscious, already dead ... - recalls resuscitator Vladislav Zagrebenko. - Loaded in the dark. Sorted according to the principle of military medicine. Seriously wounded - with a hundred percent burns - on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When the hospital went through the floors, the feeling was that we were at war. In the wards, in the corridors, in the hall, there were black people with severe burns. I've never seen anything like this, even though I worked in intensive care.

In Chelyabinsk, children from the 107th school got on the ill-fated train, going to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards.

Interestingly, the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before the departure, ran to the head of the station to convince him that, for safety reasons, the car with children should be placed at the beginning of the train. I didn’t convince ... Their “zero” car was hitched to the very end.

In the morning we found out that only one platform remained from our trailer car, - says the director of the 107th school of Chelyabinsk, Irina Konstantinova. - Out of 54 people, 9 survived. The head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So both of them died. Neither our military instructor, Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov, nor the children's favorite teacher, Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova, was found. One high school student was identified only by his watch, the other by the mesh in which his parents put groceries for him on the road.

My heart ached when a train arrived with relatives of the victims, said Anatoly Bezrukov. - They peered with hope at the wagons crumpled like pieces of paper. Elderly women crawled with plastic bags in their hands, hoping to find at least something left from their relatives.

After the wounded were taken away, the burnt and mangled pieces of bodies - arms, legs, shoulders - were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and put on a stretcher. By evening, when the refrigerators arrived, there were about 20 such stretchers filled with human remains. But even in the evening, civil defense soldiers continued to extract the remnants of flesh fused into iron from the cars with cutters. In a separate pile they put things found in the area - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason whole and unharmed, not even scorched.

Salavat Abdulin, the father of the deceased high school student Irina, found her hair clip in the ashes, which he himself repaired before the trip, her shirt.

There was no daughter on the list of the living, - he will recall later. We spent three days looking for her in hospitals. No trace. And then my wife and I went to the refrigerators ... There was one girl there. Similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I would recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either ...

Two mothers claimed for one child at once

And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently vacated. To take the wounded out of the Asha and Iglino hospitals in Ufa, a helicopter school was used. Cars landed in the center of the city in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the "heliport" to this day. Cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.

- The first patient came to us at 6 hours 58 minutes, - said the head of the burn center in the city of Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. - From eight in the morning until lunch - there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all had burns of the upper respiratory tract. More than 70% of the body was burned in half of the victims. Our center had just opened, and there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and a fibrin film, which is applied to the burnt surface, in stock. Teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived for dinner.

There were many children among the victims. I remember one boy had two mothers, each of whom was sure that her son was on the bed ...

American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, making a detour, they said: "No more than 40 percent will survive." As in a nuclear explosion, when the main injury is precisely a burn. Half of those whom they considered doomed, we pulled out. I remember a paratrooper from Chebarkul, Edik Ashirov, a jeweler by trade. The Americans said that he should be transferred to drugs and that's it. Like, still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was discharged one of the last, in September.

An unbearable situation reigned in the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, falling into a swoon there.

Arriving from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, the father and the young girl, unlike other relatives, shone with happiness. They came to their son and husband, in a young family - two kids.

We don't need lists, they dismiss it. We know he survived. Pravda wrote on the first page that he saved children. We know what lies in the 21st hospital.

Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning cars. But the publication indicated that the hero had 98% burns.

The wife and father shift from foot to foot, they want to quickly leave the mournful headquarters, where people are crying.

Take it to the morgue, - says the phone number of the 21st hospital.

Nadya Shugaeva, a milkmaid from the Novosibirsk region, suddenly starts laughing hysterically.

Found, found!

The attendants are trying to smile painfully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found ... in the lists of the dead.

The switchmen were responsible for the disaster.

When the wind still carried the ashes of those burned alive, powerful equipment was driven to the crash site. Fearing an epidemic due to unburied fragments of bodies smeared on the ground and beginning to decompose, they hastened to raze the scorched lowland of 200 hectares to the ground.

Builders answered for the death of people, for terrible burns and injuries of more than a thousand people.

From the very beginning, the investigation came to very important people: the leaders of the branch design institute, who approved the project with violations. Charges were also brought against Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan, who, by his instruction, due to cost savings, canceled telemetry - devices that control the operation of the entire highway. There was a helicopter that flew around the entire route, it was canceled, there was a lineman - the lineman was also removed.

On December 26, 1992, the trial took place. It turned out that the gas leak from the overpass occurred due to a crack caused to it four years before the disaster, in October 1985, by an excavator bucket during construction work. The product pipeline was backfilled with mechanical damage. The case was sent for further investigation.

Six years later, the Supreme Court of Bashkiria issued a sentence - all the defendants were sentenced to two years in a colony-settlement. The foreman, foreman, craftsmen, and builders were in the dock. "Shooters".

Afghans worked in the morgue.

The hardest work was undertaken by the soldiers-internationalists. The Afghans volunteered to help the special services where even experienced doctors could not stand it. The corpses of the dead did not fit in the Ufa morgue on Tsvetochnaya Street, and the human remains were stored in refrigerated trucks. Considering that it was unbearably hot outside, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flocked from all around. This work required endurance and physical strength from the volunteers, all arriving dead had to be placed on hastily knocked together shelves, tagged, sorted. Many could not stand it, shuddering in vomiting convulsions.

Relatives, distraught with grief, looking for their children, did not notice anything around, peering intently at the charred fragments of bodies. Moms and dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles, had wild dialogues:

This is not our Lenochka? they said, crowding around the black piece of meat.

No, our Lenochka had wrinkles on her arms ...

How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.

In order not to injure relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, placing on the pages pictures from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies. In this terrible collection of death there were pages with a stamp - "identified." However, many still went to refrigerators, hoping that the photos were lying. And on the guys who had recently come from a real war, suffering fell upon them, which they had not seen when fighting with dushmans. Often, the guys provided first aid to those who fainted and were on the verge of insanity from grief, or with impassive faces helped turn their charred bodies over.

You can’t revive the dead, despair came when the living began to arrive, the Afghans later said, talking about the most difficult experiences.

The lucky ones were themselves

There were also funny cases.

In the morning, a man from the Novosibirsk train came to the village council, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch, - said the district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. “But he doesn’t remember how he got out of the flaming train.” Lost the night in the forest in unconsciousness.

There were stragglers from the train and to the headquarters.

Are you looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place at the railway station.

Why are we looking for you? - surprised there, but memorized looked into the lists.

There is! - the young man was delighted, having found his name in the column of the missing.

Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he does not remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the half-station, and only after sobering up, I found out about what had happened. I got to Ufa, to report that I was alive. The young man's mother at that time methodically went around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.

Subordination failed at the site of the explosion

Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol each. It is hard to imagine how much metal and charred human flesh they had to shovel. 11 wagons were thrown off the track, 7 of them were completely burned down. People worked hard, ignoring the heat, the stench, and the almost physical horror of death that hovered in this sticky syrup.

What, uh…ate? shouts a young soldier with an autogen to an elderly man in uniform.

Colonel General GO carefully lifts his leg from the human jaw.

Sorry, - he mutters in confusion and hides in the headquarters, located in the nearest tent.

In this episode, all the conflicting emotions experienced by those present: both anger at human weakness in the face of the elements, and embarrassment - a quiet joy that it is not their remains that are being collected, and horror mixed with stupefaction - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.

At the scene of the tragedy, the railway workers found huge sums of money and valuables. All of them were handed over to the state, including a passbook for 10,000 rubles. And two days later it turned out that a teenager from Ashina had been arrested for looting. The three managed to escape. They, while the rest were saving the living, plucked gold jewelry from the dead, along with burnt fingers and ears. If the bastard had not been closed under heavy guard in Iglino, outraged local residents would have torn him to shreds. Young cops shrugged:

If they knew that the criminal would have to be protected ...

Chelyabinsk lost hockey hope.

The one hundred and seventh school of Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, the sports club "Tractor" - a youth team of hockey players, two-time champions of the country.

Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: his grandmother broke her arm.

Of the ten hockey players - champions of the Union among the combined regions - only one Alexander Sychev survived, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Genergard, Andrey Kulazhenkin, goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrey Shevchenko, lived the longest of all the burnt guys, five days. On June 15, he would have celebrated his sixteenth birthday.

“My husband and I managed to see him,” says Andrey's mother, Natalya Antonovna. - We found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. - He lay like a mummy - all in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we took him to Moscow, he kept asking: “Where are the guys?” In the 13th hospital - a branch of the Institute. Vishnevsky, we wanted to christen him, but did not have time. Doctors injected him with holy water three times through a catheter... He left us on the day of the Ascension of the Lord - he died quietly, unconscious.

The Tractor Club, a year after the tragedy, organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the dead hockey players, which has become traditional. The goalkeeper of the lost team "Tractor-73" Boris Tortunov, who then remained at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, the pupils of the "Tractor" school raised money for prizes to the participants of the tournament, which, according to tradition, are given to the mothers and fathers of the dead children.

The explosion destroyed 37 wagons and two electric locomotives, of which 7 wagons burned down completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 wagons were torn off and thrown off the tracks by the shock wave. According to official figures, 258 corpses were found at the accident site, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. In total, 575 people died, 623 were injured.

27 years ago, one of the worst railway disasters occurred at 1710 km of the Trans-Siberian Railway. According to various estimates, the tragedy claimed the lives of 575 to 645 people, including 181 children, 623 people were left disabled. "AiF-Chelyabinsk" restored the chronology of events and listened to the stories of eyewitnesses.

19:03 (local time)

In 2016, 29 people will go to the memorial for 1710 km - friends and relatives of the victims. A special train will take them to the platform.

Fast train No. 211 Novosibirsk - Adler departed from Chelyabinsk.

The train arrived in Chelyabinsk one and a half hours late. At the Chelyabinsk-Glavny station, carriage No. 0, in which students of school No. 107 and the Traktor 73 youth hockey team rode, was hooked into the tail of the train, while for safety reasons the car with children should be at the head of the train. There are 20 wagons in the train.

22:00

The train crew of one of the passing trains warns the dispatcher about the smell of gas in the region of 1710 km. The traffic is not stopped, it was decided to deal with the problem in the morning.

23:41

Fast train No. 212 Adler - Novosibirsk departs from Ufa. The delay of the train at the time of arrival in Ufa was more than an hour. Consisting of 17 wagons.

0:51

Fast train number 211 arrives at Asha station. Before Asha, the line-up followed at a courier speed, and the delay from the schedule was only 7 minutes. But here the train stood longer than expected: one of the little passengers had a fever.

1:05

Fast train No. 212 proceeded to the Ulu-Telyak station along a side track, overtaking a freight train with oil products.

1:07

The pressure drops in the pipeline. Under the influence of high temperature in the street (then it was thirty degrees hot), about 70% of the liquid hydrocarbons that managed to flow out of the pipe turned into a gaseous state. The mixture turned out to be heavier than air, it began to fill the lowland.

1:13

Two trains enter a dense white cloud. The railway ended up in the very center of a continuous zone of gas contamination (the total area of the zone is about 250 hectares).

1:14

There is an explosion. Presumably, a spark from the current collector of one of the locomotives leads to the detonation of the gas mixture. A fire starts. Voltage disappears from the contact network, the railway alarm goes out. The explosion was so strong that the lining of passenger cars scattered for 6 km, and windows in houses were shattered within a radius of 12 km from the epicenter.

The explosion threw the wagons off the tracks. Photo: Photo from dloadme.net

“My cousin, the same age, was visiting my grandmother in the village of the Criminal Code of the Ashinsky district, in a straight line to the place of the tragedy about 6-7 km. At the entrance to the house, she had an oak door with a powerful forged hook. She always threw it on the loop. When the blast wave passed, this hook bent and the door swung open in a split second. My grandmother and my brother jumped in fright. We were 13 years old at the time." says the reader "AiF" Alex.

1:20

Local residents are beginning to come to the aid of passengers. On carts, cars, buses they carry people to Asha.

1:45

A call comes in to the control panel 03 of the ambulance service in Ufa: “A wagon is on fire in Ulu-Telyak!” Preparation of places in hospitals of Ufa and Chelyabinsk begins. Soon it becomes known that almost the entire composition burned out. Ambulances hardly make their way to the scene of the tragedy, focusing on the huge glow of the fire, which can be seen for tens of kilometers.

2:30

The first fire brigades and ambulances from nearby settlements begin to arrive at the site of the explosion. Local residents help doctors dismantle the bodies of the dead and wounded.

5:00

Fire and recovery trains arrive at km 1710. But they could not start repairing the canvas right away. There was still fire all around.

“I lived in Zlatoust, at that time I had just completed my apprenticeship as an electric locomotive driver assistant and was a freelance correspondent for a newspaper. Early in the morning I was awakened with a request to go to the crash site and collect information about the Zlatoust people who traveled in these trains. The first thing I saw on the spot was a fallen and burnt forest. The smell of burning and ashes in the air. I went down the mountain to the railway tracks through this burnt forest. Under the mountain, in place of the tracks, there was a mess of trains, ”- recalls Yuri Rusin.

7:00

By this time, all the living had already been taken to the medical institutions of the station Ulu-Telyak, Ashi, pos. Iglino, Katav-Ivanovska. From there, the heaviest began to be sent to Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Moscow by helicopter. The site of the explosion has been cordoned off.

It is difficult to talk about what and how it was there, - says Yuri Rusin. - Helicopters landed and took off all the time. There were a lot of people in hospitals who were looking for their loved ones. The lists were incomplete, changes were constantly made. Some of the victims were not able to give their name, or pronounced it with difficulty and the doctors wrote it down with errors. But the worst thing was when the person’s data was on the lists of the living, relatives sighed with relief, and after a while they received terrible news of death. And at the accident site at that time, the military was working, sifting the ground to find the remains of human bodies.

8:00

The call to donate blood is heard on the radio. First of all, those who survived the burn disease were accepted, their blood is the most valuable. Doctors recall that only the inhabitants of Asha lost about 140 liters in the first hours.

There were many children among the victims. Photo: AiF / Photo by Alexander Firsov

“At that time I was a novice traumatologist, I came to the burn center in March 1989, and already in June it all happened. And I had to apply everything that I learned in medical school - practically in combat conditions. This day, June 4, was remembered for being very hot, sunny, dry, and the influx of people with injuries - almost three times more than usual. I then worked in the emergency room of hospital No. 6. Usually, if forty people come for a shift, about 120 people applied that day. When I came to the emergency room, I heard that the burn center was being reared up, everyone was being discharged ... We understood that some kind of trouble had happened, but nothing concrete was known yet. Then it was decided that all the burn patients would be gathered in one place, and in this seven-story medical building of the 6th hospital they began to vacate all the departments, all the premises. In fact, this entire building was turned into one big burn center,” recalls Mikhail Korostelev, plastic surgeon, combustiologist, doctor of the highest category.

16:00

The fire was finally extinguished, all the fires were extinguished. Work began on the restoration of the railway track.

21:00

Hastily laid new rails. The first trains went along the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak.

“I spent more than three days at the scene of the tragedy, but there was no fatigue. At the headquarters at the crash site, I was offered to fly to Chelyabinsk. They flew in two helicopters. In one, a girl, in the other, a boy, they were evacuated to the burn center. We landed at the airport, there were a lot of ambulances. Unfortunately, one of the children died while still in the air. Before the helicopter took off, a man approached me and asked me to take a large icon with me. I asked him why take her somewhere? The answer was simple: "Just take it, and then you'll figure it out yourself." This icon was at my house for three months, then something prompted me, and I handed it over to the temple under construction in Zlatoust,” says Yuri Rusin.

A memorial has been erected at the site of the tragedy, where relatives of the victims annually visit. Photo: Official website of HC "Traktor"

“I remember that a team of English doctors arrived: surgeons, anesthesiologists, psychiatrists. They worked, as they say, in full growth: they performed operations, participated in rounds, on duty. They came with their tools, consumables, even then they had disposable syringes, and we still continued to boil syringes ... For the first 10 days after the disaster, all the doctors in the center worked hard, with a break only for a short sleep. After 10 days, I just collapsed and slept for almost a day. Then back to work. After 10 days, the main insane fuss ended, the rhythm of work gradually built up, all the inspectors left. In August, they began to repair departments in this building, and at the end of September the last victims were discharged,” Mikhail Korostelev shares his memories.

“About a week or two after the explosion, we were traveling in the morning with my parents by train. It was terribly scary. Hectares of scorched earth. The train stopped and honked for a long time. It became scary from the scale of the tragedy. All the people in the car were silent, ”- our reader Alexey will remember.

There is still debate about the cause of the explosion. Perhaps it was an accidental electrical spark. Or maybe someone's cigarette worked as a detonator, because one of the passengers could well go out to smoke at night ...

But how did the gas leak come about? According to the official version, even during construction in October 1985, the pipeline was damaged by an excavator bucket. At first it was just corrosion, but a crack appeared over time from constant loads. It opened just 40 minutes before the accident, and by the time the trains passed, a sufficient amount of gas had already accumulated in the lowland.

In any case, it was the pipeline builders who were found guilty of the accident. Responsibility was borne by seven people, among whom were officials, foremen and workers.

But there is another version, according to which the leak occurred two to three weeks before the disaster. Apparently, under the influence of "stray currents" from the railway, an electrochemical reaction began in the pipe, which led to corrosion. First, a small hole formed through which the gas began to leak. Gradually, it expanded to a crack.

By the way, the drivers of the trains passing this section reported about the gas contamination a few days before the accident. A few hours before it, the pressure in the pipeline dropped, but the problem was solved simply - they increased the gas supply, which further aggravated the situation.

So, most likely, the main cause of the tragedy was elementary negligence, the usual Russian hope for "maybe" ...

The pipeline was not restored. Subsequently, it was liquidated. And on the site of the Ashina disaster in 1992, a memorial was erected. Every year relatives of the victims come here to honor their memory.

June 4, 2012 marks 23 years since the catastrophe on the railway transport, monstrous in scale and in terms of victims. The catastrophe on the stretch Asha - Ulu Telyak is the largest catastrophe in the history of Russia and the USSR, which occurred on June 4, 1989, 11 km from the city of Asha. At the time of the passage of two passenger trains, there was a powerful explosion of an unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture formed as a result of an accident on the Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline passing nearby. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), more than 600 were injured.

June 4, 1989. It was very hot these days. The weather was sunny and the air was warm. It was 30 degrees outside. My parents worked on the railway, and on June 7, Mom and I rode the “memory” train from the station. Ufa to o.p. 1710 km. By that time, the wounded and the dead had already been taken out, the railway communication had already been established, but what I saw 2 hours after departure ... I will never forget! There was nothing a few kilometers before the epicenter of the explosion. Everything is burned! Where once there was a forest, grass, bushes, now everything was covered with ashes. It's like napalm, which burned everything, leaving nothing in return. Mangled wagons lay everywhere, and there were fragments of mattresses and sheets on miraculously surviving trees. Fragments of human bodies were also scattered everywhere ... and this is the smell, it was hot outside and the cadaverous smell was everywhere. And tears, grief, grief, grief...
An explosion of a large volume of gas distributed in space had the character of a volumetric explosion. The power of the explosion was estimated at 300 tons of TNT. According to other estimates, the power of a volumetric explosion could reach 10 kilotons of TNT, which is comparable to the power of a nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (12.5 kilotons). The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave shattered windows in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene. The column of flame was visible for more than 100 km. 350 meters of railway lines and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion covered an area of about 250 hectares.
The official version claims that a gas leak from the product pipeline became possible due to damage caused to it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak started 40 minutes before the explosion.
According to another version, the cause of the accident was the corrosive effect on the outer part of the pipe of electric leakage currents, the so-called "stray currents" of the railway. 2-3 weeks before the explosion, a micro fistula formed, then, as a result of cooling of the pipe, a crack growing in length appeared at the place of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without going outside, and gradually descended down the slope to the railway.
When two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark arose, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of the gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.
It has already been 22 years since that monstrous catastrophe near Ulu-Telyak happened. More than 600 people died. And how many people were left crippled? Many have remained missing. The real culprits of this disaster have not been found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “switchmen” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not the carelessness and negligence that we encountered then. The drivers reported that there was a strong smell of gas, but no action was taken. We should not forget about this tragedy, about the pain that people endured... Until now, we are notified every day about one or another sad incident. Where more than 600 lives were interrupted by chance. For their relatives and friends, this place on the land of Bashkortostan is the 1710th kilometer by rail ...

In addition, I give excerpts from Soviet newspapers that wrote about the disaster at that time:

From the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Council of Ministers of the USSR On June 3, at 23:14 Moscow time, a gas leak occurred as a result of an accident on the liquefied gas product pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa railway section. During the passage of two oncoming passenger trains with the destination Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk, a large explosion and fire occurred. There are numerous victims.
("Pravda" June 5, 1989)

Disaster on the Trans-Siberian.
Here is what the Izvestia correspondent was told at the Ministry of Railways: The pipeline on which the disaster occurred runs about a kilometer from the Ufa-Chelyabinsk highway (Kuibyshev railway). At the time of the explosion and the resulting fire, passenger trains 211 (Novosibirsk-Adler) and 212 (Adler-Novosibirsk) were moving towards each other. The impact of the blast wave and flame threw fourteen wagons off the track, destroyed the contact network, damaged communication lines and the railway track for several hundred meters. The fire spread to the trains, and the fire was put out within a few hours. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a rupture of the Western Siberia-Ural pipeline near the Asha railway station. Raw materials for the chemical plants of Kuibyshev are distilled through it. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria ... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the accident site, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline runs through the mountains. For a certain time, the gas accumulated in two deep hollows and, for unknown reasons, exploded. The front of the rising flame was about one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbons that had collected at the rupture site had burned out. It turned out that long before the explosion, residents of nearby settlements felt a strong smell of gas in the air. It spread over a distance of approximately 4 to 8 kilometers. Such reports were received from the population around 21:00 local time, and the tragedy, as you know, occurred later. However, instead of finding and eliminating the leak, someone (while the investigation is ongoing) added pressure to the pipeline and the gas continued to spread through the hollows.
(Pravda, June 6, 1989).

An explosion on a summer night.
As a result of the leak, the gas gradually accumulated in the hollow, its concentration increased. Experts believe that the cargo and passenger trains passing alternately with a powerful air flow paved a “corridor” that was safe for themselves, and the trouble was pushed aside. According to this version, it might have moved away this time as well, since the trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk, according to the railway schedule, were not supposed to meet at this section. But by a tragic accident, on the train to Adler, one of the women went into premature labor. The doctors who were among the passengers gave her first aid. At the nearest station, the train was delayed for 15 minutes in order to transfer the mother and child to the called ambulance. And when the fateful meeting took place in a polluted area, the "corridor effect" did not work. To ignite the explosive mixture, a tiny spark from under the wheels thrown out the window of a smoldering cigarette or a lit match was enough.
(“Soviet Bashkiria” Ufa. June 7, 1989.)

On June 6, a meeting of the government commission headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR GG Vedernikov took place in the government commission in Ufa. Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the commission on urgent measures to provide assistance to the victims of the disaster on the railway. He said that at 7 am on June 6, 503 of the wounded, including 115 children, were in medical facilities in Ufa, 299 people are in serious condition. In the medical institutions of Chelyabinsk - 149 victims, including 40 children, 299 people are in serious condition. As was reported at the meeting, according to preliminary data, about 1,200 people were on both trains at the time of the accident. It is still difficult to give a more accurate figure, due to the fact that the number of children under the age of five traveling on trains, for whom, according to the current regulation, railway tickets were not purchased, and possible passengers who also did not purchase tickets, is unknown.

Before the crash, trains 211 and 212 had never met at this point. The delay of train No. 212 for technical reasons and the stop of train No. 211 at an intermediate station for the disembarkation of a woman who had begun childbirth, led these two passenger trains to the fateful place at the same time.
This is what a cold news bulletin sounds like.
The weather was windless. The gas escaping from above filled the entire lowland. The driver of the freight train, who shortly before the explosion proceeded to the 1710th kilometer, transmitted by communication that there was a strong gas contamination in this place. He was promised to...
On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak near the Zmeina Gorka, the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Flames filled everything around. The very air became fire. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the zone of intense burning. The tail cars of both trains were thrown out of the track. At the trailer "zero" car, the roof was torn off by an explosive wave, those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto the embankment.
The clock found on the ashes showed 1.10 local time.
A giant flash was seen for tens of kilometers
Until now, the mystery of this terrible catastrophe worries astrologers, scientists, and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met in a dangerous place where a product pipeline leaked? Why was there a spark? Why did the trains get into the heat, the most crowded with people in the summer, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer from the leak? Until now, the number of dead is not known for certain - in the cars in Soviet times, when names were not affixed on tickets, there could be a huge number of "hares" traveling to the blessed south and returning back.
“A flame shot up into the sky, it became bright as day, we thought we dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a district police officer of the Iglinsky police department, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - They rushed to the conflagration in cars, on tractors. Equipment on a steep slope could not climb. They began to climb the slope - all around the pines stand like burnt matches. Below they saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies ... One woman hung on a birch tree with her stomach open. An old man crawled along the slope from the fiery mess, coughing. How many years have passed, and he still stands before my eyes. Then I saw that the man was burning like gas with a blue flame.
At one in the morning, teenagers returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves among the hissing metal helped along with the adults.
- We tried to take out the children in the first place, - says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. “Adults were simply dragged away from the fire. And they moan, cry, ask to cover with something. What will you hide? They took off their clothes.
The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windbreak, looking for them by groans and screams.
- They took a person by the arms, by the legs, and his skin remained in the hands ... - said the driver of the Ural, Viktor Titlin, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - All night, until the morning, the victims were taken to the hospital in Asha.
The driver of the state farm bus, Marat Sharifullin, made three trips, and then began to shout: “I won’t go any more, I bring only corpses!” On the way, the children screamed, asked for water, burned skin stuck to the seats, many did not survive the road.
“Cars didn’t go uphill, we had to carry the wounded on ourselves,” says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - Carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, such a healthy man, endured thirty people. All in blood, but did not stop.
Sergey Stolyarov made three trips on an electric locomotive with wounded people. At the Ulu-Telyak station, he, a driver with two months of experience, missed the 212th ambulance, went on a freight train after him. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned wagons. On the embankment, the wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burnt people into the cab, Stolyarov moved to the siding, returned to the crash site with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless, and loaded, loaded ... He returned home - his shirt stood like a stake from someone else's dried blood.
“All the village equipment came, they were transported on tractors,” recalled Sergey Kosmakov, chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm. – The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children bandaged them…
Specialized assistance came much later - after one and a half to two hours.
“At 1:45 a.m., the console received a call that a wagon was on fire near Ulu-Telyak,” says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in Ufa. - Ten minutes later, they clarified: the entire composition burned out. They removed all the ambulances on duty from the line, equipped them with gas masks. No one knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. The cars just went to the torch ...
- We got out of the car on the ashes, the first thing we see is a doll and a severed leg ... - said the doctor of the ambulance Valery Dmitriev. - How many anesthetic injections had to be done - the mind is incomprehensible. When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. The baby's mother and father both died. There were no seats in the car, I put the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair curled into caked rings - like a lamb, and she smelled like a roast lamb ... I still can’t forget this girl. On the way she told me that her name was Jeanne and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age at the time. Now Zhanna should be already 21, quite a bride ...
Zhanna, who was taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev, we found. In the book of memory. Akhmadeeva Zhanna Floridovna, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three, she died in the Children's Republican Hospital in Ufa.
Trees fell like in a vacuum
The place of the tragedy smelled sharply of a putrid smell. The wagons, for some reason rusty in color, lay a few meters from the tracks, bizarrely flattened and curved. It’s even hard to imagine what temperature could make iron wriggle like that. It is amazing that in this fire, on the ground that turned into coke, where electrical poles and sleepers were uprooted, people could still remain alive!
- The military then determined: the explosion power was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half of the atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima, - said Sergey Kosmakov, chairman of the Krasny Voskhod village council. - We ran to the place of the explosion - the trees fell, as if in a vacuum - to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so strong that windows were shattered in all houses within a radius of 12 kilometers. Pieces from the wagons we found at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.
- Patients were brought on dump trucks, side by side on trucks: alive, unconscious, already dead ... - recalls resuscitator Vladislav Zagrebenko. - Loaded in the dark. Sorted according to the principle of military medicine. Seriously wounded - with a hundred percent burns - on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When the hospital went through the floors, the feeling was that we were at war. In the wards, in the corridors, in the hall, there were black people with severe burns. I've never seen anything like this, even though I worked in intensive care.
In Chelyabinsk, children from the 107th school got on the ill-fated train, going to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards.
Interestingly, the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before the departure, ran to the head of the station to convince him that, for safety reasons, the car with children should be placed at the beginning of the train. I didn’t convince ... Their “zero” car was hitched to the very end.
- In the morning we found out that only one platform remained from our trailer car, - says the director of the 107th school of Chelyabinsk, Irina Konstantinova. - Out of 54 people, 9 survived. The head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So both of them died. Neither our military instructor, Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov, nor the children's favorite teacher, Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova, was found. One high school student was identified only by his watch, the other by the mesh in which his parents put groceries for him on the road.
“My heart ached when the train arrived with the relatives of the victims,” Anatoly Bezrukov said. - They peered with hope at the wagons crumpled like pieces of paper. Elderly women crawled with plastic bags in their hands, hoping to find at least something left from their relatives.
After the wounded were taken away, the burnt and mangled pieces of bodies - arms, legs, shoulders were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and put on a stretcher. By evening, when the refrigerators arrived, there were about 20 such stretchers filled with human remains. But even in the evening, civil defense soldiers continued to extract the remnants of flesh fused into iron from the cars with cutters. In a separate pile they put things found in the area - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason whole and unharmed, not even scorched.
Salavat Abdulin, the father of the deceased high school student Irina, found her hair clip in the ashes, which he himself repaired before the trip, her shirt.
“There was no daughter on the list of the living,” he will recall later. - Three days we were looking for her in hospitals. No trace. And then my wife and I went to the refrigerators ... There was one girl there. Similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I would recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either ...
Two mothers claimed for one child at once
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently vacated. To take the wounded out of the Asha and Iglino hospitals in Ufa, a helicopter school was used. Cars landed in the city center in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the "heliport" to this day. Cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.
- The first patient came to us at 6 hours 58 minutes, - said the head of the burn center in the city of Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. - From eight in the morning until lunch - there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all had burns of the upper respiratory tract. More than 70% of the body was burned in half of the victims. Our center had just opened, and there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and a fibrin film, which is applied to the burnt surface, in stock. Teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived for dinner.
There were many children among the victims. I remember one boy had two mothers, each of whom was sure that her son was on the bed ...
American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, making a detour, they said: "No more than 40 percent will survive." As in a nuclear explosion, when the main injury is precisely a burn. Half of those whom they considered doomed, we pulled out. I remember a paratrooper from Chebarkul - Edik Ashirov, a jeweler by profession. The Americans said that he should be transferred to drugs and that's it. Like, still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was discharged one of the last, in September.
An unbearable situation reigned in the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, falling into a swoon there.
Arriving from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, the father and the young girl, unlike other relatives, shone with happiness. They came to their son and husband, in a young family - two kids.
“We don’t need lists,” they dismiss. We know he survived. Pravda wrote on the first page that he saved children. We know what lies in the 21st hospital.
Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning cars. But the publication indicated that the hero had 98% burns.
The wife and father shift from foot to foot, they want to quickly leave the mournful headquarters, where people are crying.
- Take away, in a mortuary, - informs phone of 21st hospital.
Nadya Shugaeva, a milkmaid from the Novosibirsk region, suddenly starts laughing hysterically.
- I found it, I found it!
The attendants are trying to smile painfully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found ... in the lists of the dead.

The switchmen were responsible for the disaster.
When the wind still carried the ashes of those burned alive, powerful equipment was driven to the crash site. Fearing an epidemic due to unburied fragments of bodies smeared on the ground and beginning to decompose, they hastened to raze the scorched lowland of 200 hectares to the ground.
Builders answered for the death of people, for terrible burns and injuries of more than a thousand people.
From the very beginning, the investigation came to very important people: the leaders of the branch design institute, who approved the project with violations. Charges were also brought against Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry Dongaryan, who, with his instructions, due to cost savings, canceled telemetry - devices that control the operation of the entire pipeline. There was a helicopter that flew around the entire route, it was canceled, there was a lineman - the lineman was also removed.
On December 26, 1992, the trial took place. It turned out that the gas leak from the overpass occurred due to a crack caused to it four years before the disaster, in October 1985, by an excavator bucket during construction work. The product pipeline was backfilled with mechanical damage. The case was sent for further investigation.
Six years later, the Supreme Court of Bashkiria issued a sentence - all the defendants received two years in a colony-settlement. The foreman, foreman, craftsmen, and builders were in the dock. "Shooters".

Afghans worked in the morgue.
The hardest work was undertaken by the soldiers-internationalists. The Afghans volunteered to help the special services where even experienced doctors could not stand it. The corpses of the dead did not fit in the Ufa morgue on Tsvetochnaya Street, and the human remains were stored in refrigerated trucks. Considering that it was unbearably hot outside, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flocked from all around. This work required endurance and physical strength from the volunteers, all arriving dead had to be placed on hastily knocked together shelves, tagged, sorted. Many could not stand it, shuddering in vomiting convulsions.
Relatives, distraught with grief, looking for their children, did not notice anything around, peering intently at the charred fragments of bodies. Moms and dads, grandparents, aunts and uncles, had wild dialogues:
- This is not our Lenochka? they said, crowding around the black piece of meat.
- No, our Lenochka had wrinkles on her arms ...
How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.
In order not to injure relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, placing on the pages pictures from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies. In this terrible collection of death there were pages with a stamp - "identified." However, many still went to refrigerators, hoping that the photos were lying. And on the guys who had recently come from a real war, suffering fell upon them, which they had not seen when fighting with dushmans. Often, the guys provided first aid to those who fainted and were on the verge of insanity from grief, or with impassive faces helped turn their charred bodies over.
“You can’t revive the dead, despair came when the living began to arrive,” the Afghans said later, talking about the most difficult experiences.
The lucky ones were themselves

There were also funny cases.
- In the morning, a man from the Novosibirsk train came to the village council, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch, - said district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. - And how he got out of the flaming train - he does not remember. Lost the night in the forest in unconsciousness.
There were stragglers from the train and to the headquarters.
- Looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place at the railway station.
- Why should we look for you? - they were surprised there, but studied the lists memorized.
- There is! - the young man was delighted, finding his name in the column of the missing.
Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he does not remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the half-station, and only after sobering up, I found out about what had happened. I got to Ufa, to report that I was alive. The young man's mother at that time methodically went around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.
Subordination failed at the site of the explosion
Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol each. It is hard to imagine how much metal and charred human flesh they had to shovel. 11 wagons were thrown off the track, 7 of them were completely burned down. People worked hard, ignoring the heat, the stench, and the almost physical horror of death that hovered in this sticky syrup.
- Have you, oh ... eaten? shouts a young soldier with an autogen to an elderly man in uniform.
Colonel General GO carefully lifts his leg from the human jaw.
“Excuse me,” he mutters in confusion and hides in the headquarters, located in the nearest tent.
In this episode, all the conflicting emotions experienced by those present: both anger at human weakness before the elements, and embarrassment - a quiet joy that it is not their remains that are being collected, and horror mixed with stupefaction - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.
At the scene of the tragedy, the railway workers found huge sums of money and valuables. All of them were handed over to the state, including a passbook for 10,000 rubles. And two days later it turned out that a teenager from Ashina had been arrested for looting. The three managed to escape. They, while the rest were saving the living, plucked gold jewelry from the dead, along with burnt fingers and ears. If the bastard had not been closed under heavy guard in Iglino, outraged local residents would have torn him to shreds. Young cops shrugged:
- If they knew that the criminal would have to be protected ...

Chelyabinsk lost hockey hope.
The one hundred and seventh school of Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, the sports club "Tractor" - a youth team of hockey players, two-time champions of the country.
Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: his grandmother broke her arm.
Of the ten hockey players - champions of the Union among the combined regions - only one Alexander Sychev survived, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Genergard, Andrey Kulazhenkin, goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrey Shevchenko, lived the longest of all the burnt guys, five days. On June 15, he would have celebrated his sixteenth birthday.
- My husband and I managed to see him, - says Andrei's mother Natalya Antonovna. - We found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. - He lay like a mummy - all in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we took him to Moscow, he kept asking: “Where are the guys?” In the 13th hospital - a branch of the Institute. Vishnevsky, we wanted to christen him, but did not have time. Doctors injected him with holy water three times through a catheter... He left us on the day of the Ascension of the Lord - he died quietly, unconscious.
The Tractor Club, a year after the tragedy, organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the dead hockey players, which has become traditional. The goalkeeper of the lost team "Tractor-73" Boris Tortunov, who then remained at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, the pupils of the "Tractor" school raised money for prizes to the participants of the tournament, which, according to tradition, are given to the mothers and fathers of the dead children.
The explosion destroyed 37 wagons and two electric locomotives, of which 7 wagons burned down completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 wagons were torn off and thrown off the tracks by the shock wave. According to official figures, 258 corpses were found at the accident site, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. In total, 575 people died, 623 were injured.