A fire tore through a nursing home in Russia, killing at least 23 people, an emergency official said - the latest in a series of deadly blazes that have underscored negligence and other problems plaguing state-run institutions.
The fire broke out in the two-storey nursing home in the Tula region, south of Moscow, and burned quickly through the 55-year-old brick building with wooden walls before the flames were extinguished, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said.
Fire inspectors earlier had asked courts to order the home closed because of fire safety violations, including the lack of an alarm system, he said.
More than 250 people escaped or were evacuated from the building and hospitalised, but emergency workers were finding bodies in the wreckage, Beltsov said. Nearly 24 hours after the fire broke out, the death toll stood at 23, he said, adding that it could rise further.
Most of the victims, and possibly all of them, were elderly residents of the nursing home in the town of Velye-Nikolskoye, about 250 kilometres south of Moscow, Beltsov said.
The fire was likely caused by a short circuit or carelessness, he said.
He said it appeared personnel at the home were to blame for the high death toll. Firefighters were only alerted of the blaze half an hour after it broke out, and employees "did not organise the effective evacuation" of residents, he said, citing preliminary information.
Twice in the past year following inspections, fire authorities appealed to courts to order the facility shut down because of "glaring violations" of fire safety rules, Beltsov said. He said the building had no fire alarm and no system that would automatically alert the fire department of a blaze.
Fires at hospitals, schools and other state-run facilities have served as grim reminders of official corruption and negligence, crumbling infrastructure and short life expectancy that plague Russia despite oil-fuelled economic improvements under President Vladimir Putin.
In March, a fire in a nursing home in southern Russia killed 62 people. A nearby fire station had been shut, and it took firefighters almost an hour to get to the site from a larger town after a night watchman ignored two fire alarms before reporting the blaze, authorities said.
A nursing home fire in Siberia in June killed 10 people.
In December, locked gates and barred windows prevented victims from escaping a blaze that killed 46 women at a drug treatment centre, pointing to conditions now common in post-Soviet Russia's state-run institutions. Inspectors had recommended its temporary closure earlier in the year because of safety violations.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/russian-nursing-home-fire-kills-at-least-23/2007/11/05/1194117959526.html
