Train collision in Bashkiria 1989. Train accident near Ufa

26 years ago, on the night of June 3-4, 1989, in the bearish Ural corner on the border Chelyabinsk region and Bashkiria, a pipeline through which liquefied gas was pumped from Western Siberia to the European part exploded Soviet Union. At the same moment, 900 meters from the scene of the incident, two resort trains, crowded with vacationers, were passing in opposite directions along the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was the worst train disaster in Soviet history, killing at least 575 people, including 181 children. Onliner.by talks about the incredible chain of random coincidences that led to it, which had monstrous consequences.

Early summer of 1989. While the still united country is living out its recent years, the friendship of peoples is bursting at the seams, the proletarians are actively disunited, the only food in stores is canned bulls in tomato sauce, but pluralism and glasnost are in their heyday: tens of millions Soviet people cling to TV screens, watching with desperate interest the sessions of the First Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR. The crisis is, of course, a crisis, but the vacation is on schedule. Hundreds of seasonal resort trains are still rushing to the hot seas, where the population of the Union can still spend their full labor rubles on a well-deserved vacation.

All tickets for trains No. 211 Novosibirsk - Adler and No. 212 Adler - Novosibirsk have been sold. Twenty carriages of the first and eighteen carriages of the second were filled with families of Uralians and Siberians who were just striving for the much desired Black Sea coast Caucasus and those who have already rested there. They carried vacationers, rare business travelers, and young guys from the Chelyabinsk hockey team "Tractor-73", two-time national champions, who decided instead of a vacation to work in the grape harvest in sunny Moldova. In total, on that terrible June night, there were (only according to official data) 1,370 people inside the two trains, including 383 children. The numbers are most likely inaccurate, since separate tickets were not sold for children under five years of age.

At 1:14 a.m. on June 4, 1989, almost all passengers on both trains were already asleep. Someone is tired after long journey, someone was just preparing for it. No one was prepared for what happened in the next moment. And you cannot prepare for this under any circumstances.

“I woke up from falling from the second shelf onto the floor (it was already two o’clock in the morning according to local time), and everything around was already on fire. It seemed to me that I was seeing some kind of nightmare: the skin on my hand was burning and slipping, a child engulfed in fire was crawling under my feet, a soldier with empty eye sockets was walking towards me with outstretched hands, I was crawling past a woman who could not extinguish her own hair, and in the compartment there are no shelves, no doors, no windows..."- one of the miraculously surviving passengers later told reporters.

The explosion, the power of which, according to official estimates, was 300 tons of TNT, literally destroyed two trains, which at that very moment met at the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway on the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section, near the border of the Chelyabinsk region and Bashkiria. Eleven cars were thrown off the rails, seven of them were completely burned. The remaining cars burned out inside, they were broken in the shape of an arc, the rails were twisted into knots. And in parallel with this, tens and hundreds of unsuspecting people died a painful death.

Pipeline PK-1086 Western Siberia- Ural - Volga region was built in 1984 and was originally intended for oil transportation. Already at the last moment, almost before the facility was put into operation, the Ministry of Oil Industry of the USSR, guided by a logic understandable only to it, decided to repurpose the oil pipeline into a product pipeline. In practice, this meant that instead of oil, a so-called “wide fraction of light hydrocarbons” was transported through a pipe with a diameter of 720 millimeters and a length of 1852 kilometers - a mixture of liquefied gases (propane and butane) and heavier hydrocarbons. Although the facility changed its specialization, it was built as ultra-reliable with the expectation of future high pressure inside. However, already at the design stage, the first mistake was made in a chain of those that five years later led to the largest tragedy on railways ah Soviet Union.

At 1,852 kilometers long, a full 273 kilometers of the pipeline passed in close proximity to the railways. In addition, in a number of cases the object came dangerously close to populated areas, including quite major cities. For example, in the section from kilometer 1428 to kilometer 1431, PK-1086 passed less than a kilometer from the Bashkir village of Sredny Kazayak. A gross violation of safety standards was discovered after the launch of the product pipeline. Construction of a special bypass around the village began only the following year, 1985.

In October 1985, during excavation work to open PK-1086 at the 1431st kilometer of its length, powerful excavators working on the ultra-protected pipe caused it significant mechanical damage, for which the product pipeline was not designed at all. Moreover, after the construction of the bypass was completed, the insulation of the section that was opened and left open, in violation of building codes, was not checked.

Four years after those events, a narrow gap 1.7 meters long appeared in the damaged section of the product pipeline. The propane-butane mixture began to flow through it into the environment, evaporate, mix with the air and, being heavier than it, accumulate in the lowland through which the Trans-Siberian Railway passed 900 meters to the south. Very close to the strategic railway line, along which passenger and freight trains passed every few minutes, a real invisible “gas lake” formed.

The drivers drew the attention of site dispatchers to the strong smell of gas in the area of ​​the 1710th kilometer of the road, as well as a drop in pressure in the pipeline. Instead of accepting emergency measures to stop traffic and eliminate the leak, both duty services chose not to pay attention to what was happening. Moreover, the organization operating PK-1086 even increased the gas supply to it to compensate for the pressure drop. As propane and butane continued to accumulate, disaster became inevitable.

The Novosibirsk - Adler and Adler - Novosibirsk trains could not possibly meet at this fateful point. Under no circumstances if they followed the schedule. But train 212 was late due to technical reasons, and train 211 was forced to make an emergency stop at one of the intermediate stations to disembark a passenger who had gone into labor, which also resulted in a shift in the schedule. An absolutely incredible coincidence, unthinkable even in the most cruel nightmares, coupled with a blatant violation of technological discipline, nevertheless occurred.

Two late trains met at the damned 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway at 1:14 am. An accidental spark from the pantograph of one of the electric locomotives, or a spark from the train braking after a long descent into a lowland, or even a cigarette butt thrown out of the window was enough to ignite the “gas lake”. At the moment the trains met, a massive explosion of the accumulated propane-butane mixture occurred, and the Ural forest turned into hell.

A policeman from Asha, a city 11 kilometers from the crash site, later told reporters: “I was awakened by a flash of terrible brightness. There was a glow on the horizon. After a couple of tens of seconds, Asha heard blast wave, which broke a lot of glass. I realized that something terrible had happened. A few minutes later I was already at the city police department, together with the guys I rushed to the “duty room” and rushed towards the glow. What we saw is impossible to imagine even with a sick imagination! The trees burned like giant candles, and the cherry-red carriages smoked along the embankment. There was an absolutely impossible single cry of pain and horror from hundreds of dying and burned people. The forest was burning, the sleepers were burning, people were burning. We rushed to catch the rushing “living torches,” knock the fire off them, and bring them closer to the road away from the fire. Apocalypse…".

More than 250 people instantly burned in this gigantic fire. No one can say the exact numbers, because the temperature at the epicenter of the disaster exceeded 1000 degrees - there was literally nothing left of some passengers. Another 317 people died later in hospitals from terrible burns. The worst thing is that almost a third of all victims were children.

People died in families, children - in entire classes, along with the teachers who accompanied them on vacation. Parents often didn’t even have anything left to bury. 623 people received injuries of varying severity, many of them remained disabled for life.

Despite the fact that the scene of the tragedy was in a relatively inaccessible area, the evacuation of the victims was organized quite quickly. Dozens of helicopters were working, the victims of the disaster were taken out by trucks, even by an uncoupled electric locomotive of a freight train that stood at a nearby station and allowed those same Adler passenger trains to pass. The number of victims could have been even greater if it had not been for a modern burn center, which opened in Ufa shortly before the incident. Doctors, police, railway workers, finally ordinary people, volunteers from neighboring communities worked around the clock.

In June 1989, the largest train accident occurred. Two trains collided on the Ufa-Chelyabinsk section. As a result, 575 people were killed (181 of them children) and another 600 people were injured.

At approximately 00:30 am local time, a powerful explosion was heard near the village of Ulu-Telyak - and a column of fire rose 1.5-2 kilometers upward. The glow was visible 100 kilometers away. In village houses, glass flew out of the windows. The blast wave felled the impenetrable taiga along the railway at a distance of three kilometers. Hundred-year-old trees burned like big matches.

A day later, I flew in a helicopter over the scene of the disaster, and saw a huge black spot, like a napalm-scorched spot, more than a kilometer in diameter, in the center of which lay carriages twisted by the explosion.

...

According to experts, the equivalent of the explosion was about 300 tons of TNT, and the power was comparable to the explosion in Hiroshima - 12 kilotons. At that moment, two passenger trains were passing there - “Novosibirsk-Adler” and “Adler-Novosibirsk”. All passengers traveling to Adler were already looking forward to a vacation on the Black Sea. Those who were returning from vacation were coming to meet them. The explosion destroyed 38 cars and two electric locomotives. The blast wave threw another 14 cars off the tracks downhill, “tying” 350 meters of tracks into knots.

...

As eyewitnesses said, dozens of people thrown out of trains by the explosion rushed along the railway like living torches. Entire families died. The temperature was hellish - the victims still wore melted gold jewelry (and the melting point of gold is above 1000 degrees). In the fiery cauldron, people evaporated and turned into ashes. Subsequently, it was not possible to identify everyone; the dead were so burned that it was impossible to determine whether they were a man or a woman. Almost a third of the dead were buried unidentified.

In one of the carriages were young hockey players from Chelyabinsk “Traktor” (team born in 1973) - candidates for the USSR youth team. Ten guys went on vacation. Nine of them died. In another carriage there were 50 Chelyabinsk schoolchildren who were going to pick cherries in Moldova. The children were fast asleep when the explosion occurred, and only nine people remained unharmed. None of the teachers survived.

What actually happened at kilometer 1710? The Siberia - Ural - Volga gas pipeline ran near the railway. Gas flowed through a pipe with a diameter of 700 mm high pressure. A gas leak occurred from a rupture in the main (about two meters), which spilled onto the ground, filling two large hollows - from the adjacent forest to the railway. As it turned out, the gas leak began there a long time ago; the explosive mixture accumulated for almost a month. Local residents and drivers of passing trains spoke about this more than once - the smell of gas could be felt 8 kilometers away. One of the drivers of the “resort” train also reported the smell on the same day. These were his last words. According to the schedule, the trains were supposed to pass each other in another place, but the train heading to Adler was 7 minutes late. The driver had to stop at one of the stations, where the conductors handed over to the waiting doctors a woman who had gone into premature labor. And then one of the trains, descending into the lowland, slowed down, and sparks flew from under the wheels. So both trains flew into a deadly gas cloud, which exploded.

By some miracle, overcoming the impassability, two hours later 100 medical and nursing teams, 138 ambulances, three helicopters arrived at the scene of the tragedy, 14 ambulance teams, 42 ambulance squads worked, and then just trucks and dump trucks evacuated the injured passengers. They were brought “side by side” - alive, wounded, dead. There was no time to figure it out; they loaded it in pitch darkness and haste. First of all, those who could be saved were sent to hospitals.

People with 100% burns were left behind - by helping one such hopeless person, you could lose twenty people who had a chance to survive. Hospitals in Ufa and Asha, which took the main load, were overcrowded. American doctors who came to Ufa to help, seeing the patients of the Burn Center, stated: “no more than 40 percent will survive, these and these do not need to be treated at all.” Our doctors managed to save more than half of those who were already considered doomed.

The investigation into the causes of the disaster was conducted by the USSR Prosecutor's Office. It turned out that the pipeline was left virtually unattended. By this time, due to economy or negligence, pipeline overflights were canceled and the position of lineman was abolished. Nine people were eventually charged, with a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison. After the trial, which took place on December 26, 1992, the case was sent for a new “investigation.” As a result, only two were convicted: two years with deportation outside of Ufa. The trial, which lasted 6 years, consisted of two hundred volumes of testimony from people involved in the construction of the gas pipeline. But it all ended with the punishment of the “switchmen”.

An eight-meter memorial was built near the site of the disaster. The names of 575 victims are engraved on the granite slab. Here, 327 urns with ashes rest. Pine trees have grown around the memorial for 28 years - in the place of the previous ones that died. The Bashkir branch of the Kuibyshev Railway built a new stopping point - “Platform 1710 kilometer”. All trains going from Ufa to Asha make a stop here. At the foot of the monument lie several route boards from the cars of the Adler - Novosibirsk train.

June 4, 2012 marks 23 years since a catastrophe, monstrous in scale and in terms of casualties, occurred on railway transport. The disaster on the Asha - Ulu Telyak stretch is the largest disaster in the history of Russia and the USSR, which occurred on June 4, 1989, 11 km from the city of Asha. As two passenger trains passed, there was a powerful explosion of an unlimited cloud of fuel-air mixture formed as a result of an accident on the nearby Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline. 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 railroad, and on June 7, Mom and I went on the “memory” train from the station. Ufa to op. 1710 km. By that time, the wounded and dead had already been taken out, the railway connection 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 was burned! Where once there was forest, grass, bushes, now everything was covered with ash. It's like napalm, which burned out everything, leaving nothing in return. Mangled carriages lay everywhere, and there were fragments of mattresses and sheets on the miraculously surviving trees. There were also fragments of human bodies scattered everywhere... and that was the smell, it was hot outside and the smell of corpses was everywhere. And tears, grief, grief, grief...
The 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 trinitrotoluene. According to other estimates, the power of the volumetric explosion could reach 10 kilotons of TNT, which is comparable to the power of the nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (12.5 kilotons). The force of the explosion was such that the shock wave broke windows in the city of Asha, located more than 10 km from the scene of the incident. The column of flame was visible more than 100 km away. 350 meters destroyed railway tracks, 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines. The fire caused by the explosion engulfed an area of ​​about 250 hectares.
The official version states that the gas leak from the product pipeline was possible due to damage caused to it by an excavator bucket during its construction in October 1985, four years before the disaster. The leak began 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 that grew in length appeared at the point of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without coming out, and gradually went down the slope to the railway.
When the two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark occurred, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.
22 years have already passed since this monstrous disaster occurred near Ulu-Telyak. More than 600 people died. How many people were left crippled? Many remained missing. The real culprits of this disaster were never found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “switchmen” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not for 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 must not forget about this tragedy, the pain that people experienced... Until now, every day we are notified of one or another sad incident. Where, by chance, more than 600 lives were interrupted. For their family and friends, this place on the land of Bashkortostan is the 1710th kilometer along the railway...

In addition, I provide 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 a liquefied gas product pipeline, in the immediate vicinity of the Chelyabinsk-Ufa section of the railway. An explosion occurred during the passage of two oncoming passenger trains destined Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk great strength and fire. There are numerous victims.
(“Pravda” June 5, 1989)

At approximately 23:10 Moscow time, one of the drivers radioed: they had entered a zone of heavy gas pollution. After that, the connection was lost... As we now know, after that there was an explosion. Its strength was such that all the glass on the central estate of the Red Sunrise collective farm flew out. And this is several kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion. We also saw a heavy pair of wheels, which in an instant found itself in the forest at a distance of more than five hundred meters from the railway. The rails were twisted into unimaginable loops. What then can we say about people? A lot of people died. From some, only a pile of ashes remained. It’s hard to write about this, but the train heading to Adler included two carriages with children going to a pioneer camp. Most of them burned down.
(“Soviet Bashkiria” Ufa. June 5, 1989.)

Disaster on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
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 cars 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 extinguished within a few hours. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a rupture in the Western Siberia - Ural pipeline near the Asha railway station. Raw materials for Kuibyshev chemical plants are distilled through it. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the scene of the accident, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline runs through mountainous terrain. Over a period of time, gas accumulated in two deep hollows and, for reasons still unknown, exploded. The front of the rising flame was approximately one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbon that had accumulated 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 messages came from the population around 21:00 local time, and the tragedy, as is known, occurred later. However, instead of searching for 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).

Explosion in summer night.
As a result of the leak, gas gradually accumulated in the ravine, its concentration increasing. Experts believe that the freight and passenger trains passing alternately with a powerful air flow paved a safe “corridor” for themselves, and the trouble was pushed aside. According to this version, it might have been pushed back this time, since the Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk trains, according to the railway schedule, were not supposed to meet on this section. But by a tragic accident, on the train en route to Adler, one of the women went into premature labor. Doctors among the passengers provided first aid to her. At the nearest station, the train was delayed for 15 minutes to hand over the mother and child to the called ambulance. And when the fatal meeting took place in a polluted area, the “corridor effect” did not work. A tiny spark from under the wheels, a smoldering cigarette thrown out the window, or a lit match was enough to ignite the explosive mixture.
(“Soviet Bashkiria” Ufa. June 7, 1989.)

On June 6 in Ufa, a meeting of the government commission was held, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G.G. Vedernikov. The Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the commission on urgent measures to provide assistance to those injured as a result of the railway disaster. He reported that as of 7 a.m. on June 6, there were 503 wounded people in Ufa medical institutions, including 115 children, in serious condition There are 299 people. There are 149 victims in medical institutions in Chelyabinsk, including 40 children; 299 people are in serious condition. As was reported at the meeting, according to preliminary data, there were about 1,200 people on both trains at the time of the disaster. It is still difficult to give a more precise figure, due to the fact that the number of children under five years of age traveling on trains, for whom, according to the current regulations, railway tickets were not purchased, and possible passengers who also did not purchase tickets, is unknown.

Until the time of the disaster, trains No. 211 and No. 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 to disembark a woman who had gone into labor brought these two passenger trains to the fatal place at the same time.
This is what a cold news report sounds like.
The weather was calm. The gas flowing from above filled the entire lowland. The driver of a freight train, which had passed the 1710th kilometer shortly before the explosion, reported via communication that there was heavy gas pollution in this place. They promised to sort it out...
On the stretch Asha - Ulu-Telyak at Zmeinaya Gorka the ambulances almost missed each other, but there was a terrible explosion, followed by another. Everything around was filled with flames. The air itself became fire. By inertia, the trains rolled out of the intense burning zone. The tail cars of both trains were thrown off the track. The roof of the trailed “zero” car was torn off by the blast wave, and those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto the embankment.
The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time.
A giant flash was seen tens of kilometers away
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 did the spark occur? Why did the trains, which were the most crowded with people in the summer, end up in the inferno, and not, for example, freight trains? And why did the gas explode a kilometer away from the leak? The number of deaths is still not known for certain - in the carriages in Soviet times, when names were not put on tickets, there could have been a huge number of “hares” traveling to the blessed south and returning back.
“A flame shot up into the sky, it became as bright as day, we thought, we dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky police department and a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - We rushed to the fire in cars and tractors. The equipment could not climb the steep slope. They began to climb the slope - there were pine trees all around like burnt matches. Below we saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies... One woman was hanging on a birch tree with her stomach ripped 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 o'clock in the morning, teenagers who were returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves, amid the hissing metal, helped along with the adults.
“We tried to carry the children out first,” says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. “The adults were simply pulled away from the fire. And they moan, cry, and ask to be covered with something. What will you cover it with? They took off their clothes.
The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windfall and were searched for by moans and screams.
“They took a man by the hands, by the legs, and his skin remained in his hands...” said Ural driver 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 shouting: “I won’t go anymore, I’m bringing only corpses!” Along the way, children screamed, asked for something to drink, burnt skin stuck to the seats, and many did not survive the journey.
“The cars didn’t go up the mountain, we had to carry the wounded on ourselves,” says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. – They were carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, such a healthy man, carried about thirty people. Covered in blood, but did not stop.
Sergei 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 and went on a freight train after it. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned cars. On the embankment, the overhead wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burned people into the cabin, Stolyarov moved to the siding and returned to the scene of the disaster with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless and loaded, loaded... He returned home - his shirt was like a stake from the clotted blood of someone else.
“All the village equipment arrived, they were transporting it 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 them...
Specialized help came much later - after one and a half to two hours.
“At 1.45 a.m. the control panel received a call that a carriage was burning near Ulu-Telyak,” says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in the city of Ufa. - Ten minutes later they clarified that the entire train had burned out. All duty ambulances were removed from the line and equipped with gas masks. Nobody knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. The cars just went to the torch...
“We got out of the car into the ashes, the first thing we saw was a doll and a severed leg...” said the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. “I can’t imagine how many painkilling injections I had to give.” When we set off with the wounded children, a woman ran up to me with a girl in her arms: “Doctor, take it. Both the baby’s mother and father died.” There were no seats in the car, so I sat the girl on my lap. She was wrapped up to her chin in a sheet, her head was all burned, her hair was curled into baked rings - like a lamb’s, and she smelled like a roasted lamb... I still can’t forget this little girl. On the way, she told me that her name was Zhanna and that she was three years old. My daughter was the same age then. Now Zhanna should be 21, quite a bride...
We found Zhanna, who was being taken out of the affected area by the ambulance doctor Valery Dmitriev. In the book of memory. Zhanna Floridovna Akhmadeeva, born in 1986, was not destined to become a bride. At the age of three she died at the Ufa Children's Republican Hospital.
Trees fell as if in a vacuum
At the scene of the tragedy there was a strong smell of corpses. The carriages, 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’s amazing that in this fire, on the ground that had turned to coke, where electrical poles and sleepers were uprooted, people could still remain alive!
- The military later determined: the power of the explosion was 20 megatons, which corresponds to half atomic bomb, which the Americans dropped on Hiroshima,” said Sergei Kosmakov, chairman of the “Red Sunrise” village council. - We ran to the scene of the explosion - the trees fell as if in a vacuum - to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so powerful that glass was broken in all houses within a 12-kilometer radius. We found pieces from the carriages at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.
- The patients were brought in on dump trucks, on trucks side by side: alive, unconscious, already dead... - recalls resuscitator Vladislav Zagrebenko. - They loaded in the dark. Sorted by principle military medicine. The seriously wounded - with one hundred percent burns - are placed on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one, you will lose twenty. When we walked through the floors of the hospital, it felt like we were at war. In the wards, in the corridors, in the hall there were black people with severe burns. I have never seen anything like this, even though I worked in intensive care.
In Chelyabinsk, children from school No. 107 boarded the ill-fated train, heading to Moldova to work in a labor camp in the vineyards.
It is interesting that the head teacher of the school, Tatyana Viktorovna Filatova, even before departure, ran to the station manager to convince her that, due to safety regulations, the carriage with the children should be placed at the beginning of the train. I wasn’t convinced... Their “zero” carriage was attached to the very end.
“In the morning we learned that only one platform remained from our trailer car,” says Irina Konstantinova, director of school No. 107 in Chelyabinsk. - Out of 54 people, 9 survived. Head teacher - Tatyana Viktorovna was lying on the bottom shelf with her 5-year-old son. So the two of them died. Neither our military instructor Yuri Gerasimovich Tulupov nor the children’s favorite teacher Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova were found. One high school student was identified only by his watch, another by the net in which his parents put food for his journey.
“My heart sank when the train arrived with the relatives of the victims,” said Anatoly Bezrukov. - They peered with hope into the carriages, crumpled like pieces of paper. Elderly women crawled with plastic bags in their hands, hoping to find at least something left of their relatives.
After the wounded were taken away, the burnt and mangled pieces of their bodies were collected - arms, legs, shoulders were collected throughout the forest, removed from the trees and placed on stretchers. By the evening, when the refrigerators arrived, there were about 20 such stretchers filled with human remains. But even in the evening the soldiers civil defense They continued to use cutters to remove the remains of flesh fused into the iron from the cars. 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 singed.
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, and her shirt.
“The daughter was not on the lists of survivors,” he will recall later. “We searched for her in hospitals for three days. No traces. And then my wife and I went through the refrigerators... There was one girl there. She is similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I’d recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either...
Two mothers claimed one child at once
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently released. To bring the wounded from the Asha and Iglino hospitals to Ufa, a helicopter school was used. The cars landed in the city center in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the “helipad” to this day. The cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.
“The first patient was admitted to us at 6:58 a.m.,” said the head of the burn center in Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. - From eight in the morning until lunch, there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all of them had burns of the upper respiratory tract. Half of the victims had more than 70% of their bodies burned. Our center had just opened; there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and fibrin film in stock, which is applied to the burned surface. By lunchtime, teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived.
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 crib...
American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, made a round, and said: “No more than 40 percent will survive.” Like in a nuclear explosion, when the main injury is a burn. We rescued half of those whom they considered doomed. I remember a paratrooper from Chebarkul - Edik Ashirov, a jeweler by profession. The Americans said that he should be switched to drugs and that’s it. Like, he’s still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was one of the last to be discharged, in September.
An unbearable situation reigned at the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, fainting right there.
The father and young girl who arrived from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, unlike other relatives, were glowing with happiness. They came to see their son and husband, a young family with two children.
“We don’t need lists,” they wave it off. “We know he survived.” Pravda wrote on the first page that he saved children. We know what lies in Hospital No. 21.
Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning carriages. But the publication stated 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.
“Pick it up, at the morgue,” says the phone number of Hospital No. 21.
Nadya Shugaeva, milkmaid from Novosibirsk region suddenly starts laughing hysterically.
- Found it, found it!
The attendants try to smile forcefully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found it... on the lists of the dead.

The switchmen were responsible for the disaster.
When the wind was still carrying the ashes of those burned alive, powerful equipment was driven to the site of the disaster. 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 were responsible for the death of people, for terrible burns and injuries of more than a thousand people.
From the very beginning, the investigation turned on very important people: the leaders of the industry design institute, who approved the project with violations. Deputy Minister of Oil Industry Dongaryan was also charged, who, by his order, in order to save money, canceled telemetry - instruments that monitor 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 was 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 Supreme Court Bashkortostan sentenced all defendants to two years in a penal settlement. In the dock were the site manager, foreman, foremen, and builders. “Switchmen.”

Afghans worked in the morgue.
The internationalist soldiers took on the hardest work. 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 and human remains were stored in refrigerated vehicles. Considering that it was incredibly hot outside, the smell around the makeshift glaciers was unbearable, and flies flocked from all over the area. This work required stamina and physical strength from the volunteers; all arriving dead had to be placed on hastily put together shelves, tagged, and sorted. Many could not stand it, shuddering and vomiting.
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:
- Isn’t this our Lenochka? - they said, crowding around a black piece of meat.
- No, our Helen had folds on her arms...
How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.
In order not to traumatize relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, with photographs from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies placed on the pages. This terrible collection of death had pages stamped “identified.” However, many still went to the refrigerators, hoping that the photographs lie. And the guys who had recently come from a real war were subjected to suffering that they had not seen while fighting the dushmans. Often the guys provided first aid to those who fainted and were on the verge of madness from grief, or with impassive faces they helped turn over the charred bodies of their relatives.
“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 on their own

There were also funny cases.
“In the morning, a man came to the village council from the Novosibirsk train, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch,” said district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. - He doesn’t remember how he got out of the train that caught fire. I lost my way in the forest at night, unconscious.
Those who were left behind from the train showed up at headquarters.
- Are you 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, but looked at the lists by rote.
- Eat! – the young man was delighted when he found his name in the column of missing persons.
Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he doesn’t remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the stop, and only when I had sobered up did I learn about what had happened. I got to Ufa and reported that I was alive. At this time, the young man’s mother methodically walked around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.
There was no chain of command at the explosion site
Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine how much metal and burnt human flesh they had to shovel. 11 cars were thrown off the tracks, 7 of them were completely burned. People worked fiercely, not paying attention to the heat, the stench and the almost physical horror of death hovering in this sticky syrup.
- What, oh... did you eat? - a young soldier with an autogenous gun shouts to an elderly man in uniform.
Colonel General Civil Defense carefully lifts his foot from the human jaw.
“Sorry,” he mutters in confusion and disappears into the headquarters, located in the nearest tent.
In this episode, all the contradictory emotions that those present experienced: anger at human weakness in the face of the elements, and embarrassment - quiet joy that it is not their remains that are being collected, and horror mixed with stupor - when there is a lot of death - it no longer causes violent despair.
At the scene of the tragedy, railway workers found huge sums of money and valuables. All of them were handed over to the state, including a savings book for 10 thousand rubles. And two days later it turned out that an Asha teenager had been arrested for looting. Three managed to escape. While the others were rescuing the living, they tore off gold jewelry from the dead along with their burnt fingers and ears. If the bastard had not been locked up under serious security in Iglino, indignant local residents would have torn him to shreds. The young cops shrugged:
- If only they knew that they would have to defend the criminal...

Chelyabinsk has lost its hockey hope.
The 107th school in Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, and the Traktor sports club lost its youth team of hockey players, two-time national champions.
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 regional national teams - only one survived, Alexander Sychev, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Generalgard, Andrei Kulazhenkin, and goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrei Shevchenko, lived the longest of the burned 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 there like a mummy, covered in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we were taking him to Moscow, he kept asking: “Where are the guys?” In the 13th hospital - a branch of the Institute named after. We wanted to christen Vishnevsky, but we didn’t have time. The 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 Traktor club, a year after the tragedy, organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the deceased hockey players, which became traditional. The goalkeeper of the deceased Traktor-73 team, Boris Tortunov, who then stayed at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, the students of the Traktor school raised money for prizes for the tournament participants, which are traditionally awarded to the mothers and fathers of the dead children.
The explosion destroyed 37 cars and two electric locomotives, of which 7 cars burned completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 cars were torn off and thrown off the tracks by the shock wave. According to official data, 258 corpses were found at the scene of the accident, 806 people received burns and injuries of varying severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. A total of 575 people died and 623 were injured.

On the night of June 3-4, 1989, on the Asha-Ulu-Telyak railway section not far from Ufa, due to a pipeline break, there was a crowd of trains on the route of trains. large number highly flammable gas-gasoline mixture. As two passenger trains passed each other in opposite directions, a random spark triggered a violent explosion. Almost 600 people died.
With the beginning of the perestroika era in the USSR, the number of serious disasters and accidents increased sharply. Every few months, one or another terrible event occurred, claiming many lives. In just a few years, two nuclear power plants sank submarines, the steamer "Admiral Nakhimov" sank, an accident occurred on Chernobyl nuclear power plant, an earthquake in Armenia, railway accidents followed one after another. There was a feeling that both technology and nature rebelled at the same time.
But often irreparable consequences were caused not by equipment failure, but by human factor. The most common sloppiness. Responsible employees seemed to stop caring about all the job descriptions. Less than two years before the accident near Ufa, four serious accidents on the railways occurred one after another, causing considerable casualties. On August 7, 1987, at the Kamenskaya station, a freight train accelerated too much, was unable to brake and crushed a passenger train standing at the station, resulting in the death of more than a hundred people. Cars of train No. 237 Moscow - Kharkov, which crashed at the Elnikovo station in the Belgorod region.
The cause of the disaster was a gross violation of instructions by several employees. On June 4, 1988, a train carrying explosives exploded in Arzamas. More than 90 people died. In August of the same year, the high-speed train "Aurora", traveling along the Moscow - Leningrad route, crashed due to the gross negligence of the road master. 31 people died. There was a crash and explosion in October 1988 freight train in Sverdlovsk, which killed 4 people and injured more than 500. In most of these incidents, the human factor played a key role.
It seemed that the wave of disasters and accidents should have caused a much more serious and responsible attitude towards job descriptions and safety standards. But, as it turned out, this did not happen, and new terrible events were not long in coming.

The ill-fated pipeline

In 1984, the PK-1086 pipeline was built along the route Western Siberia - Ural - Volga region. Initially, it was intended to transport oil, but shortly before its commissioning it was decided to replace the oil with a liquefied gas-gasoline mixture. Since it was originally planned to transport oil through it, the pipeline had a pipe diameter of 720 mm. Repurposing for transportation of the mixture required replacement of pipes. But due to the reluctance to spend money on replacing the already installed highway, nothing was changed.
Although the pipeline passed through populated regions and crossed several railway lines, in order to save money, it was decided not to install an automatic telemetry system, which made it possible to quickly diagnose possible leaks. Instead, linemen and helicopters were used to measure the concentration of gas in the atmosphere. However, later they were also abolished and, as it turned out, no one was monitoring the pipeline at all, because they were sorry for the money. The high authorities decided that it was much cheaper not to waste effort and money on diagnosing problems, but to shift it onto the shoulders of local residents. They say that concerned residents will report a leak, then we will work, otherwise let everything go as it goes, why spend money on it.
After the pipeline began operating, it suddenly became clear that someone somewhere had overlooked it and the pipeline was built in violation of the rules. On one of the three-kilometer sections, the pipe ran less than a kilometer from a populated area, which was prohibited by the instructions. As a result, we had to make a detour. Earthworks were carried out precisely in the area where the leak later occurred, leading to the explosion.
Excavation work on the site was carried out using excavators. During the work, one of the excavators damaged the pipe, which no one noticed. After installing the bypass, the pipe was immediately buried. Which was a gross violation of the instructions, which required a mandatory check of the integrity of the area where repair work was carried out. The workers did not check the site for strength, and the management also did not control their work. The work acceptance certificate was signed without looking at it, without any inspections of the site, which was also unacceptable.
It was on this section of the pipeline, which was damaged during work, that a gap formed during operation. A gas leak through it led to the tragedy.

Another negligence

Frame from documentary film"Highway". Construction of the Druzhba oil pipeline.
However, the disaster could have been avoided if not for another portion of the staff’s disregard for their duties. On June 3, at approximately 9 p.m., pipeline operators received a message from the Minnibaevsky gas processing plant about a sharp drop in pressure in the pipeline and a decrease in the flow rate of the mixture.
However, the service personnel working that evening did not bother. Firstly, the control panel was still located more than 250 kilometers from the site and they could not immediately check it. Secondly, the operator was in a hurry to go home and was afraid of missing the bus, so he did not leave any instructions for the shift workers, saying only that the pressure had dropped in one of the sections and they needed to “turn up the gas.”
Those who joined night shift the operators increased the pressure. The leak appears to have been there for a long time, but the damage to the pipe was minor. However, after increasing the pressure, new damage occurred in the problem area. As a result of the damage, a gap of almost two meters in length was formed.
Less than a kilometer from the leak site, one of the sections of the Trans-Siberian Railway passed through. The leaking mixture settled in a lowland not far from the railway tracks, forming a kind of gas cloud. The slightest spark was enough to turn the area into a fiery inferno.
During these three hours, while the gas accumulated near the main line, trains passed through the area repeatedly. Some drivers reported to the dispatcher about heavy gas pollution in the area. However, the railway dispatcher did not take any measures, since he did not have contact with the pipeline operators, and at his own peril and risk did not dare to slow down traffic along the Trans-Siberian Railway.
At this time, two trains were moving towards each other. One went from Novosibirsk to Adler, the other returned to opposite direction, from Adler to Novosibirsk. In fact, their meeting at this site was not scheduled. But the train traveling from Novosibirsk was unexpectedly delayed at one of the stops due to the fact that one of the pregnant passengers went into labor.

Accident

At about 1:10 minutes on June 4 (in Moscow it was still late evening on June 3), two trains met at the station. They were already beginning to disperse when a powerful explosion was heard. Its power was such that the column of flame was observed tens of kilometers from the epicenter. And in the city of Asha, located 11 kilometers from the explosion, almost all the residents were awakened, as the blast wave broke the glass in many houses.
The explosion site was in a difficult to reach area. There was no immediate area settlements Moreover, there were forests around, which made it difficult for vehicles to pass through. Therefore, the first teams of doctors did not arrive immediately. In addition, according to the recollections of the doctors who were the first to arrive at the scene of the disaster, they were shocked because they did not expect to see anything like this. They were on a call to a fire in a passenger carriage and were prepared for a certain number of casualties, but not for the apocalyptic picture that appeared before their eyes. One would have thought that they were in the midst of an atomic bomb explosion.
The power of the explosion was about 300 tons of TNT. Within a radius of several kilometers, the entire forest was destroyed. Instead of trees, there were flaming sticks sticking out of the ground. Several hundred meters of the railway track were destroyed. The rails were twisted or missing altogether. Electrical poles were knocked down or severely damaged within a radius of several kilometers from the explosion. There were things lying everywhere, elements of carriages, smoldering scraps of blankets and mattresses, fragments of bodies.
There were a total of 38 cars in the two trains, 20 in one train and 18 in the other. Several carriages were mangled beyond recognition, the rest were engulfed in flames both outside and inside. Some of the cars were simply thrown off the tracks onto the embankment by the explosion.
When the monstrous scale of the tragedy became clear, all doctors, firefighters, police officers, and soldiers were urgently called from all settlements in the surrounding area. Local residents also followed them, helping in any way they could. The victims were taken by car to hospitals in Asha, from where they were transported by helicopter to clinics in Ufa. The next day, specialists from Moscow and Leningrad began arriving there.


Both trains were “resort” trains. The season had already begun, people with whole families were traveling south, so the trains were crowded. In total, there were more than 1,300 people on both trains, including both passengers and train crew workers. More than a quarter of the passengers were children. Not only those traveling with their parents, but also those heading to pioneer camps. In Chelyabinsk, a carriage was attached to one of the trains, in which the hockey players of the Chelyabinsk Traktor youth team were traveling south.
According to various estimates, between 575 and 645 people died. This spread is explained by the fact that separate tickets were not issued for small children at that time, so the death toll could be higher than the officially announced 575 people. In addition, there could be hares on the train. Tickets for “resort” trains sold out quickly and not everyone had enough, so there was an unspoken practice of traveling in the conductors’ compartment. Of course, for a certain fee to the conductors themselves. Almost a third of the dead, 181 people, were children. Of the ten Traktor hockey players traveling in the trailer car, only one young man survived. Alexander Sychev received serious burns to his back, but was able to recover, return to sports and perform at his best. high level up to 2009.
More than 200 people died directly on the spot. The rest died in hospitals. More than 620 people were injured. Almost all received serious burns, many were left disabled. Only a few dozen lucky people managed to survive without serious damage.

Consequences

On the afternoon of June 4, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived at the scene of the disaster, accompanied by members of the government commission to investigate the accident, headed by Gennady Vedernikov. Secretary General stated that the disaster was possible due to the irresponsibility, disorganization and mismanagement of officials.
This was already a period of glasnost, so this catastrophe, unlike many others, was not hushed up and was covered in the media mass media. In terms of its consequences, the accident near Ufa became the largest disaster in the history of domestic railways. Its victims were almost as many people as died during the entire existence of railways in the Russian Empire (more than 80 years).
At first, the version of a terrorist attack was seriously considered, but later it was abandoned in favor of a gas explosion due to a pipeline leak. However, it was never clear what exactly caused the explosion: a cigarette butt thrown out of the train window or an accidental spark from the current collector of one of the electric locomotives.
The accident had such a resonance that this time the investigation demonstrated with all its might that it intended to bring all the culprits to justice, regardless of their merits. At first it really seemed that the persecution of the “switchmen” would not be possible. The investigation was of interest to very high-ranking officials, right up to Deputy Minister of Oil Industry Shahen Dongaryan.
During the investigation, it became clear that the pipeline was left virtually unattended. In order to save money, almost all diagnostic enterprises were cancelled, from the telemetry system to the site crawlers. In fact, the line was abandoned; no one really looked after it.
As often happens, we started out very vigorously, but then things stalled. Soon, various kinds of political and economic cataclysms associated with the collapse of the USSR began, and the disaster gradually began to be forgotten. The first court hearing in the case took place not in the USSR, but in Russia in 1992. As a result, the materials were sent for further investigation, and the investigation itself abruptly changed direction and high-ranking persons disappeared from among the persons involved in the case. And the main accused were not those who operated the pipeline in violation of basic safety requirements, but the workers who repaired the section.
In 1995, six years after the tragedy, a new trial took place. The defendants included the workers of the repair team who made the diversion at the site, as well as their superiors. All of them were found guilty. Several people were immediately amnestied, the rest received short sentences, but not in a camp, but in a colony-settlement. The lenient sentence went almost unnoticed. Over the past six years, many disasters have occurred in the country, and terrible disaster near Ufa during this time faded into the background.