The place where the explosion occurred on June 3, 1989. Train accident near Ufa

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.

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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. 14 more carriages blast wave threw it off the tracks downhill, “tying” 350 meters of tracks into knots.

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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. High pressure gas flowed through a pipe with a diameter of 700 mm. 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 started there a long time ago, 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.

From the first days of its existence, the railway became a source increased danger. Trains hit people, collide with each other and derail. However, on the night of June 3-4, 1989, a train accident occurred near Ufa, the likes of which had no analogues in either Russian or world history. However, then the cause of the accident was not the actions of railway workers, nor damage to the tracks, but something completely different, far from the railway - an explosion of gas leaking from a pipeline passing nearby.

Train accident near Ufa on the night of June 3-4, 1989

Object: 1710 kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway, section Asha - Ulu-Telyak, Kuibyshevskaya railway, 11 km from Asha station, Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. 900 meters from the Siberia-Ural-Volga region product pipeline (pipeline).

Victims: 575 people were killed (258 at the scene of the accident, 317 in hospitals), 623 people were injured. According to other sources, 645 people died

Causes of the disaster

We know exactly what caused the train accident near Ufa on June 4, 1989 - a massive explosion of gas that leaked from the pipeline through a 1.7-meter-long crack and accumulated in the lowland along which the Trans-Siberian Railway passes. However, no one will say why the gas mixture flared up, and there is still debate about what led to the formation of a crack in the pipe and a gas leak.

As for the immediate cause of the explosion, the gas could have flared up from an accidental spark that slipped between the pantograph and the contact wire, or in any other component of the electric locomotives. But it is possible that the gas exploded from a cigarette (after all, there were many smokers on the train with 1284 passengers, and some of them could have gone out to smoke at one in the morning), but most experts are inclined to the “spark” version.

As for the reasons for gas leaks from the pipeline, everything is much more complicated. According to the official version, the pipeline was a “time bomb” - it was damaged by an excavator bucket during construction in October 1985, and under the influence of constant loads, a crack appeared at the damage site. According to this version, a crack in the pipeline opened just 40 minutes before the accident, and during this time quite a lot of gas accumulated in the lowland.

Because this version became official, pipeline builders were found guilty of the accident - several officials, foremen and workers (seven people in total).

According to another version, the gas leak began much earlier - two to three weeks before the disaster. First, a microfistula appeared in the pipe - a small hole through which gas began to leak. Gradually the hole widened and grew into a long crack. The appearance of the fistula is probably caused by corrosion resulting from an electrochemical reaction under the influence of “stray currents” from the railway.

It is impossible not to note several other factors that are in one way or another connected with the occurrence emergency situation. First of all, standards were violated during the construction and operation of the pipeline. Initially, it was conceived as an oil pipeline with a diameter of 750 mm, but later, when the pipeline was actually built, it was repurposed as a product pipeline for transporting liquefied gas-gasoline mixture. This could not be done, since the operation of product pipelines with a diameter of over 400 mm is prohibited by all regulations. However, this was ignored.

According to experts, this terrible accident could have been avoided. A few days later, drivers of locomotives passing along this stretch reported increased gas pollution, but these messages were ignored. Also, on this section of the pipeline, a few hours before the accident, the gas pressure dropped, but the problem was solved simply by increasing the gas supply, which, as is now clear, only worsened the situation. As a result, no one found out about the leak, and soon there was an explosion.

It’s interesting that there is also a conspiracy theory about the causes of the disaster (where would we be without it!). Some “experts” claim that the explosion was nothing more than a sabotage by American intelligence services. And this was one of the accidents that was part of the secret American program for the collapse of the USSR. This version does not stand up to criticism, but it turned out to be very “tenacious” and today it has many supporters.

A lot of shortcomings, ignoring technical problems, bureaucracy and basic negligence - that’s real reasons train accident near Ufa on the night of June 3-4, 1989.

Chronicle of events

The chronicle of events can begin from the moment when the driver of one of the trains passing along the Asha - Ulu-Telyak section reported increased gas pollution, which, in his opinion, posed a danger. It was approximately ten o'clock in the evening local time. However, the message was either ignored by dispatchers, or simply did not have time to reach the responsible officials.

IN 1:14 local time, two trains met in a lowland filled with a “gas lake” and an explosion occurred. It was not just an explosion, but a volumetric explosion, which, as is known, is the most destructive type of chemical explosion. The gas ignited immediately in its entire volume, and in this fireball the temperature momentarily rose to 1000 degrees, and the length of the flame front reached almost 2 kilometers.

The disaster occurred in the taiga, far from large settlements and roads, so help could not come quickly. The first to come to the scene of the accident were the residents of the village of Asha, located 11 km away, the residents of Asha, and subsequently played a big role in rescuing the victims - they looked after the sick and generally provided all possible assistance.

A few hours later, rescuers began to arrive at the scene of the disaster - the battalion soldiers were the first to start work civil defense, and then rescue train crews joined them. The military evacuated the victims, cleared away the rubble, and restored the tracks. The work went quickly (fortunately, in early June the nights are light and dawn comes early), and by morning the only evidence of the accident was the scorched forest within a kilometer radius and scattered carriages. All the victims were taken to Ufa hospitals, and the remains of the victims were recovered during the day on June 4 and transported by car to Ufa morgues.

Complete work to restore the tracks (after all, this is the Trans-Siberian Railway, its stop at long time fraught with the most serious problems) were completed in a few days. But for many more days and weeks, doctors fought for the lives of seriously wounded people, and relatives with tears in their eyes tried to identify their relatives and friends in the burned fragments of the bodies...

Consequences

According to various estimates, the force of the explosion ranged from 250 - 300 (official version) to 12,000 tons of TNT equivalent (recall that the one dropped on Hiroshima atomic bomb had a yield of 16 kilotons).

The glow of this monstrous explosion was visible at a distance of up to 100 km, shock wave glass was broken in many houses in the village of Asha at a distance of 11 km. The explosion destroyed about 350 meters railway tracks and 3 km of contact network (30 supports were destroyed and overturned), about 17 km of overhead communication lines were damaged.

Two locomotives and 37 cars were damaged, 11 cars were thrown off the tracks. Almost all the carriages were burned out, many of them were crushed, some of the carriages were missing their roofs and trim. And several carriages were bent like bananas - it is difficult to imagine how powerful the explosion was to throw multi-ton carriages off the road in an instant and thus cripple them.

The explosion started a fire that engulfed an area of ​​over 250 hectares.

The ill-fated pipeline was also damaged. The decision was made not to restore it, and it was soon liquidated.

The explosion claimed 575 human lives, of which 181 were children. Another 623 people were seriously injured and left disabled various categories. 258 people died on the spot, but no one can claim that these are exact numbers: people were literally torn apart by the explosion, their bodies mixed with earth and twisted metal, and most of the discovered remains were not bodies, but only mutilated fragments of bodies. And no one knows how many dead remained under the hastily restored railway track.

Another 317 people died in hospitals in the days following the accident. Many people suffered burns over 100% of the body, fractures and other injuries (including traumatic amputation of limbs), and therefore simply had no chance of survival.

Current situation

Today, in the place where 24 years ago there was a monstrous explosion, there is taiga and silence, broken by passing freight and passenger trains. However, electric trains traveling from Ufa to Asha do not just pass by - they certainly stop at the “1710th kilometer” platform, built here a few years after the disaster.

In 1992, a memorial was erected next to the platform in memory of the victims of the disaster. At the foot of this eight-meter-tall monument you can see several road signs that were torn from the carriages during the explosion.

Warn and prevent

One of the causes of the disaster was a violation of operating standards for product pipelines - there were no leakage monitoring sensors on the pipe; visual inspection linemen. But something else was more dangerous: along its length the pipeline had 14 dangerous approaches (less than 1 kilometer) and intersections with railway and highways. The problematic pipeline was dismantled, but the problem was not solved - tens of thousands of kilometers of pipelines were laid in the country, and it is impossible to keep track of every meter of these pipes.

However, real steps to prevent similar disasters in the future were made 15 years after the accident: in 2004, on the instructions of OJSC Gazprom, a system for monitoring the crossings of main pipelines across roads (SKP 21) was developed, which has been implemented on the roads since 2005. pipelines of Russia.

And now we can only hope that modern automation will prevent a catastrophe like the Ufa one from happening again.

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, the Trans-Siberian Railway was passing through opposite directions two resort trains at once, crowded with vacationers. 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 in their scale.

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 disuniting, the only food in stores is canned “Bulls in tomato sauce", but pluralism and openness 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 a view to future high blood 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 the railways of the Soviet Union.

At 1,852 kilometers long, a whopping 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 the earthworks when opening 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 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. A couple of tens of seconds later, a blast wave reached Asha, breaking 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 and 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.

When two trains - “Novosibirsk-Adler" and "Adler-Novosibirsk" - were passing nearby, the gas that had accumulated in the lowland exploded. According to official data, 575 people were killed. A quarter of a century later, eyewitnesses of the tragedy remember this day.

MET YOUR FUTURE WIFE IN THE HOSPITAL

Sergei Vasiliev was 18 in 1989. He worked as an assistant driver of the Novosibirsk-Adler train. After the events near Ulu-Telyaq he was awarded the Order “For Personal Courage”:

In three days I had to go to the army. Perhaps I would have been sent to Afghanistan. At least that's what I thought. There was no foreboding of trouble that day. We rested in Ust-Katav, hitched the train and returned home. The only thing I noticed was the bad fog that was spreading across the ground.

After the explosion, I woke up on the floor, and everything was burning there. The driver was pinned in the cab. I started to pull him out, and he was a healthy, heavy man. As I later found out, he died in the hospital on the sixth day. As soon as I pulled it out, I saw that the door was blocked by bars - I somehow managed to get it out.

We got out. I thought my driver wouldn’t be able to get up - he was all burned, he could barely move... But he got up and walked away! State of shock. I had 80% burns, all that was left on my body were shoulder straps, a belt and sneakers without soles.

In one of the carriages, a grandmother and five grandchildren were going to the sea to relax. She hits the window, she can’t break it - double. I helped her, broke the glass with a stone, she gave me three grandchildren. Three survived, and two died there... My grandmother also remained alive, she later found me in the hospital in Sverdlovsk.

The first thing I thought then was that the war had begun, that it was a bombing. When I found out that the cause of the explosion was someone’s negligence, I was so angry... It hasn’t let me go for 25 years. I spent almost three months in the hospital, where they pieced me together again, piece by piece. In the hospital and met my future wife. Then he tried to work again as an assistant driver. I was able to endure it for a year: as soon as the train approached this place, my blood pressure immediately jumped. I couldn't. He transferred and became an inspector. That's how I still work.

“A PILE OF ASH, AND IN THE MIDDLE IS A TIE CLIP. THERE WAS A SOLDIER"

The district police officer of the Krasny Voskhod village, Anatoly Bezrukov, was 25. He saved seven people from burning cars and helped take the victims to hospitals.

First there was one explosion, then a second. If there is a hell, then it was there: you climb out of the darkness onto this embankment, there is a fire in front of you and people are crawling out of it. I saw a man burning with a blue flame, the skin hanging on his body in rags, a woman on a branch with her stomach ripped open. And the next day I went to the site for work and began collecting material evidence. Here lies the ashes, all that’s left of the man, and in the middle there’s a shiny pin from a tie—that means there was a soldier. I wasn't even afraid. No one could be more afraid than those who traveled on these trains. There was a smell of burning there for a very long time...

“A LOT OF PEOPLE – AND EVERYONE IS ASKING FOR HELP”

Krasny Voskhod resident Marat Yusupov is now 56 years old. On the day of the disaster, Marat saved four people from the carriage and loaded the cars with “severe” victims.

There was no forest left at all around these trains, but it was dense. All the trees fell down, just black stumps. The earth was scorched to the ground. I remember many, many people, everyone asking for help, complaining about the cold, although it was warm outside. They took off all their clothes and gave them to them. I was the first to carry a little girl, I don’t know if she’s alive...

RED GAZERBOARDS AT THE SITE OF BURNED CARS

Sergey Kosmatkov, head of the Krasny Voskhod village council:

Everyone says that there were 575 dead, in fact - 651. They just couldn’t identify them, only ashes and bones remained. Two days after the fire, workers came to lay new rails directly on the remains. People then stood up like a wall, collected everything in bags and buried it right next to the tracks. And three years later we erected an obelisk here. It symbolizes two melted rails and at the same time a female profile. There are also bright red gazebos near the road. They were installed in places where completely burnt-out carriages lay. Relatives gather there and remember.

HOW IT WAS

Important facts about the disaster

✔ On the night of June 4, 1989, at the 1710th kilometer of the Asha-Ulu-Telyak section, almost on the border with the Chelyabinsk region, two trains met: Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk. The explosion occurred at 01.14 - multi-ton carriages were scattered through the forest like splinters. Of the 37 cars, seven burned completely, 26 burned out from the inside, 11 were torn off and thrown off the tracks.

✔ This meeting should not have happened. But one train was late due to technical problems, and a woman who began to give birth was disembarked from the second.

✔ According to official data, there were 1,284 people on two trains, but in those years names were not written on tickets, “hares” easily infiltrated, children under five years old traveled without tickets at all. Therefore, there were most likely more people. The lists of the dead often contain the same names - families were traveling on vacation and back.

✔ There was a gas pipeline at a distance of a kilometer from the railway; it was built four years before the tragedy. And, as it turned out during the investigation, with violations. The gas pipeline ran through a lowland, among the forest, and the railway runs along a high embankment. A crack appeared in the pipe, gas gradually began to accumulate in the valley and creep towards the trains. What served as the detonator is still unknown. Most likely, an accidentally thrown cigarette butt from the vestibule or a spark from under the wheels.

✔ By the way, a year before this incident, there had already been an explosion on this pipe. Several workers died then. But no measures were taken. For the death of 575 people, the “switchmen” - the workers who served the site - were punished. They were given two years in prison.

On the night of June 3–4, 1989, the largest train accident in the history of the USSR and Russia occurred at the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The explosion and fire, which killed over 600 people, are known as the Ashinskaya disaster or the tragedy near Ufa. “AiF-Chelyabinsk” collected stories from people who, 29 years later, still remember what happened as clearly as if it happened yesterday.

“We thought a war had started”

Those who happened to go through the fiery hell and survive remember in detail scary moments. For many, these pictures are deeply etched in their memory, even despite young age. Since 2011, they have been sharing their stories on a page dedicated to the memory of the victims of the disaster.

“When this tragedy happened, I was five years old,” says Tatyana S. “My parents and two brothers and I went to the south to relax, but we didn’t get there. Even though I was little, I remember everything as it is now: the explosion, the flames, the screams, the fear... Thank God, everyone in my family survived, but it’s impossible to forget. We were traveling in the third carriage of train 211, it was night... my dad was in another carriage (he was in the video salon). When the explosion occurred, we thought that a war had begun. Dad somehow ended up on the street and walked, not knowing where - his consciousness became clouded from the explosion - but, as it turned out later, he was walking towards us. We stood in the middle of the compartment and couldn’t get out, everything was dripping (plastic) and everything was burning, we couldn’t break the glass, but then it broke on its own due to the temperature. We saw dad and started shouting to him, he came up, mom threw us (the children) out his window, it was very high, and that’s how we got out. It was very cold, my feet stuck to the ground. Mom took the blanket with her teeth, since her hands were burned, wrapped me up and we walked for several kilometers along the rails, along the bridge on which only trains travel, it was terribly dark. In general, if dad had gone in the other direction, everything would have turned out differently.

We got to some station, locomotives rushed past us at breakneck speed, everyone was in shock, but then we were all evacuated to hospitals. Mom was taken to Kuibyshev, dad to Moscow, brothers to Ufa, and me to Nizhny Novgorod. I have a 20% burn, my mom and dad have my hands, and my brothers are lucky, they have superficial burns. Rehabilitation took a very long time, several years, especially psychologically, because watching people burn alive is not just scary, but terrifying... And this Novosibirsk-Adler route has haunted me all my life, it so happened that my brother went to live to the south and I have to ride this train, and only God knows how my soul turns inside out when I ride it.”

Among others, a man shared his story, who then went south, to the sea, with his wife and little daughter.

“We were traveling in a compartment, a young mother with a boy of 6-8 months and her mother were traveling with us. Neither I nor my daughter heard the explosion; she and I probably shouldn’t have woken up. My wife and daughter slept on the bottom bunk, I on the top. A grandmother with her grandson is on the bottom, a young mother is on the top. I was sleeping on my stomach, and then, as if from a cellar: “Valera, Valera...” I opened my eyes: the compartment was on fire. “Mother of God, where is Olesya?” There are no partitions, I began to scatter the remains of the partitions, the skin on my fingers immediately turned out like on boiled sausages. “Dad, dad...” Found it! Out the window, mom! “Dad, is this war? Are these Germans? Let’s go home quickly...” Grandmother and grandson out the window. "Save Natasha!" The top shelf was torn off along with her, she is sitting in the corner, the shelf is on her head. The chiffon dress melted on her, covered in bubbles. It hurt my hands, I tried with my back, and it burned me on the melting leatherette. Lifts with shelf. He tore out the shelf with his hands, his head was broken, his brain was visible. Somehow through her window and there too.

We walked. I was at the 20th anniversary of the accident, I walked that path again, two km. It was the right decision Then. Some climbed into the river, into the water, and died there; some fled into the forest. A wife with a broken ankle was carrying her daughter on her back. She didn’t cry, didn’t scream, she had 4th degree burns, her nerve endings were burned out. At the stop - two or three barracks - about 30 people gathered. Wild screams of the survivors, as if all the dead in the world had woken up at once. After some time, a fire train approached, distraught people rushed to it, the firefighters had no choice but to pick up the people and return them to Ulu-Telyak. “Dad, why are you so scary? Dad, do I have candy in my hands (burn blisters)?” - the last thing I heard from her. At the Ulu-Telyak hospital they euthanized her with injections. By bus to Asha. “I won’t go anywhere without my wife and child.” In Asha, my wife is in the ward with her daughter, I am with them: “Nowhere without me.”

After some time on the helicopter to Ufa, I begin to “float” from the injections. To the operating room only with my daughter. I started crying. "What are you doing?" "Everything is fine". “What time is it? 12? God, I've been on my feet for 12 hours. Put me to sleep! I have no strength." After anesthesia, a person is such a vegetable... Mom, father-in-law, wife's brother... Where from? A compassionate woman in Ulu-Telyak sent a telegram, I bow to her. “Where is Olesya? Allah? "In this hospital." Fell asleep. I woke up, they were dragging me somewhere, my mother was nearby. "Where?" “To Moscow” “Olesya?” "With you". The four young soldiers were somehow on a stretcher. “Drop it, I’ll get up on my own now!” “Where, you can’t!” “Black Tulip” (An-12 plane - editor's note) - an old friend, a two-story stretcher. And everyone: “Drink! Mom, drink!” In Moscow I woke up in Sklif, my hands looked like boxing gloves. “Will you cut it?” “No, boy, hold on...”

The daughter died on June 19, fully conscious in terrible torment, kidneys failed... They told me about this, after pumping me full of morphine, on the ninth day. He tore the bandages, howled like a wolf... A thunderstorm, such as I had never heard before or since, a hurricane of rain that day. These are the tears of the departed. A year later, to the same day, on June 19, a son was born..."

"The pain doesn't go away"

Explosion gas mixture was so powerful that the bodies of some passengers were never found later. Some died immediately, others unsuccessfully tried to get out, and those who managed to leave the hot cars died later from burns. The burned adults tried to save the children - there were many schoolchildren on the train who were going on vacation.

“My friend Andrei Dolgachev fell into this “hell” when he was traveling home from the army to the city of Novoanninsky, Volgograd Region, train No. 211, car 9,” ​​writes Vladimir B. “The car did not overturn, but it burned out completely. That night, Andrei pulled a burnt pregnant woman out of the carriage; her fate is unknown to me. He didn’t have very many burns (about 28%), although they were deep. Andrei died two weeks after the disaster at the Sverdlovsk Burn Center. He was 18 years old. The family was poor, they were buried by the whole city. Eternal memory to everyone who died there!”

“My uncle - Kirtava Rezo Razhdenovich, 19 years old, after studying he went to another military unit. That night, he pulled more than ten children from the burning train who were traveling from the camp, says Tamara B. He received burns incompatible with life (80%), the burns were received just during the rescue of the children. He died on the fourth day after the disaster. Posthumously awarded... A street in the village where he was born and raised was named in his honor: the village of Leselidze (Kingisepp), Abkhazian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Georgia.”

“My employee’s relatives died in this disaster: his brother’s wife and two sons,” Galina D. shares her story. “My brother was a military man, so in search of his family he had the opportunity to fly over the scene of the disaster by helicopter. What he saw shocked him. Unfortunately, his relatives were traveling in one of the last carriages, the same ones that were at the epicenter of the explosion. All that was left of the carriage itself was the wheeled platform, everything burned to the ground. He never found his beloved and dear wife and children; earth and ashes were buried in coffins. A few years later, this man married again and had a son. But according to his sister (my employee), this nightmare still does not leave him, he does not feel truly happy, despite the fact that his son and heir are growing up. He lives with pain that does not go away, despite time.”

“The whole body is a complete burn”

The news of the disaster spread quickly, and within half an hour first aid arrived at the scene of the explosion - local residents began to help the wounded and take people to hospitals. Hundreds of people worked at the scene of the tragedy - young cadets cleared the rubble, railway workers restored the tracks, doctors and volunteer assistants evacuated the victims. Doctors recall that there were queues of people wishing to donate blood for the wounded at the hospitals in Asha, Chelyabinsk, Ufa and Novosibirsk.

“I was 8 years old, we were vacationing with relatives in Iglino,” recalls Evgenia M. “My aunt worked in the hospital as a nurse, a colleague came running for her in the morning, and they called the entire medical staff. During the day we went outside - there was a roar in the sky from helicopters, it was scary. A group of children went to the hospital. The picture still remains in my memory - a little girl is being carried from the ambulance, three years old, she’s crying, she has no clothes and her whole body is completely burnt... It was terrible.”

“I was there. From the Ufa Air Force training on Karl Marx, - writes Dmitry G. - Wake up on alarm in the morning, take your lunch and take the Ikarus to the place. They collected the dead, there were not enough mittens, they tore some rags and wrapped their hands. I don’t remember the stretchers, they were carried on raincoats and laid out with them. The fires were then extinguished further, further away, where the forest was smoldering. Gorbachev flew in, Yazov, helicopters flew before their arrival, we were placed in a cordon around their deliberative tent. There were not only ours, other soldiers, railway workers, like, or construction battalion workers... Cadets, I don’t remember where exactly.”

Birthday disaster

Almost always after major disasters There are people on transport who were saved by chance from death - they were late and decided to return their tickets. A similar story was told by Yulia M. from the Chelyabinsk region; at the time of the Ashinsky tragedy she was very young.

“This disaster happened on my birthday, I was about to turn three years old, and my parents decided to give me a gift - a trip to my grandmother. Since I grew up in the military town of DOS (city of Chebarkul), we had to leave from this station. Every year, tickets were purchased directly a few hours before the train (such were the circumstances), and always safely. But this time the following happened: dad periodically ran to the box office to inquire about tickets, the cashier told him every time, don’t worry, you will have tickets five hours before arrival. Closer to that time, dad comes up to find out again, and they tell him: come back in an hour. Me, mom and dad spent the whole day at the station. The older brother was already with his grandmother (they wanted to go to Tambov). As a result, upon the arrival of the train, the cashier says: it’s not possible with tickets, but they will be there tomorrow. Dad quarreled with her, mom and dad quarreled with each other out of nerves, I’m crying... And since the transport was no longer running, we went home with our suitcases through the forest, nervous and upset. And in the morning we found out that such a tragedy had occurred... So my birthday is double and on the same date.”

"Almost no one knows"

The investigation lasted several years, and the official version states that the cause of the explosion was the leak of hydrocarbons from the main pipeline and the subsequent detonation of the gas-air mixture from an accidental spark in the place where two oncoming trains Adler-Novosibirsk and Novosibirsk-Adler were passing simultaneously. It is known that a few hours before the tragedy, the driver of a passing train reported the smell of gas, but they decided to deal with this problem later. It turned out that the pipeline itself ran too close to the railway.

“I remember about the disaster from the age of 6, my parents talked about two trains with which something happened, I learned the details at the age of 16, I remember exactly, because it was just 10 years since the disaster,” says Yulia K., “I studied I watched all the materials I found and watched all the films. I tell my students and am very surprised that almost no one knows anything about the disaster. It is clear that today’s students were born much later than 1989, but we live in Chelyabinsk, many of them are from the region, this is, among other things, the history of our region.”

At the 1710th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway there is a memorial to the victims of the Ashinsky disaster; every year those whose lives that night divided into “before” and “after” come to see it. It would seem that such a tragedy should have become a cruel lesson about what happens due to human negligence. Both the participants in those events and the relatives of the victims really want that no one else has to experience the pain they experienced.