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

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

In any case, it was the pipeline builders who were found guilty of the accident. Seven people were held responsible, including officials, foremen and workers.

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

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

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

They did not restore the pipeline. It was subsequently liquidated. And at the site of the Ashinsky disaster in 1992, a memorial was erected. Every year, relatives of the victims come here to honor their memory.

From the first days of its existence, the railway became a source of increased danger. Trains hit people, collide with each other and derail. However, on the night of June 3-4, 1989, near Ufa there was a train accident, which had no analogues either in 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.

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

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 of an emergency. 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 in its entire volume at once, 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 big role in rescuing 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 first to begin work were the soldiers of the civil defense battalion, and then the 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.

The work to restore the tracks (after all, this is the Trans-Siberian Railway, stopping it for a long time is fraught with the most serious problems) was 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 atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a power of 16 kilotons).

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

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 remained disabled in 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 off 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, and no 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.

Train accident near Ufa- the largest railway accident in the history of Russia and the USSR, which occurred on June 4 (June 3, Moscow time) 1989 in the Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, 11 km from the city of Asha (Chelyabinsk region) on the Asha - Ulu-Telyak stretch. At the moment of the oncoming passage of two passenger trains No. 211 “Novosibirsk-Adler” and No. 212 “Adler-Novosibirsk”, a powerful explosion of a cloud of light hydrocarbons occurred as a result of an accident on the nearby Siberia-Ural-Volga region pipeline. 575 people were killed (according to other sources 645), 181 of them were children, more than 600 were injured.

Incident

On the pipe of the Western Siberia-Ural-Volga region product pipeline, through which a wide fraction of light hydrocarbons (liquefied gas-gasoline mixture) was transported, a narrow gap 1.7 m long appeared. Due to a pipeline leak and special weather conditions, gas accumulated in the lowland along which 900 m from the pipeline passed the Trans-Siberian Railway, a section Ulu-Telyak - Asha Kuibyshev Railway, 1710th kilometer of the main line, 11 km from Asha station, on the territory of the Iglinsky district of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Approximately three hours before the disaster, instruments showed a drop in pressure in the pipeline. However, instead of looking for a leak, the duty personnel only increased the gas supply to restore pressure. As a result of these actions, a significant amount of propane, butane and other flammable hydrocarbons leaked out through an almost two-meter crack in the pipe under pressure, which accumulated in the lowland in the form of a “gas lake.” The ignition of the gas mixture could have occurred from an accidental spark or a cigarette thrown from the window of a passing train.

The drivers of passing trains warned the train dispatcher of the section that there was heavy gas pollution on the section, but they did not attach any importance to this.

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 m of railway tracks and 17 km of overhead communication lines were destroyed. The fire caused by the explosion covered an area of ​​about 250 hectares.

The explosion damaged 37 cars and 2 electric locomotives, of which 7 cars were to the point of exclusion from inventory, 26 were burned out from the inside. The impact of the shock wave led to the derailment of 11 cars. An open longitudinal crack with a width of 4 to 40 cm and a length of 300 m formed on the slope of the roadbed, causing the slope part of the embankment to slide down to 70 cm. The following were destroyed and put out of action: the rail-sleeper grid - for 250 m; contact network - over 3000 m; longitudinal power supply line - for 1500 m; automatic blocking signal line - 1700 m; 30 contact network supports. The length of the flame front was 1500-2000 m. A short-term rise in temperature in the explosion area reached more than 1000 °C. The glow was visible for tens of kilometers.

The crash site is located in a remote, sparsely populated area. Providing assistance was very difficult due to this circumstance. 258 corpses were found at the site, 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.

Pipeline

During operation between 1989 and 1989, 50 accidents occurred on the product pipeline. major accidents and failures, which, however, did not lead to human casualties.

After the accident near Asha, the product pipeline was not restored and was liquidated.

Versions of the accident

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 microfistula 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, possibly 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.

The trial lasted for six years, nine officials were charged, two of them were subject to amnesty. Among the rest are the head of the construction and installation department of the Nefteprovodmontazh trust, foremen, and other specific performers. The charges were brought under Article 215, Part II of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The maximum penalty is five years in prison.

An Association of victims and relatives of those killed near Asha was created.

At two o'clock in the morning local time, a bright glow shot up from the direction of Bashkiria. The column of fire flew up hundreds of meters, then a blast wave came. The roar caused glass to break out in some houses.

Svetlana Shevchenko, head teacher of educational work at school 107:

Our boys did not sleep that night. It was the first evening, they joked and chatted. Our teacher Irina Mikhailovna Strelnikova was just walking around the carriage and said: “Guys, it’s already one in the morning, and you’re still not sleeping...”. And they were placed on the third shelves; they all wanted to travel in the same compartment. When it crashed, the roof was blown off - they were thrown out. This saved them.

Alexey Godok, in 1989, first deputy head of the passenger service of the South Ural Railway:

When we flew over the scene of the accident, it seemed as if some kind of napalm had gone through. The trees were left with black stakes, as if they had been stripped from root to top. The carriages were scattered, scattered...

This must happen - the train that came from Novosibirsk was 7 minutes late. If he had passed on time or if they had met in another place, nothing would have happened. The tragedy is this - at the moment of the meeting, a spark passed from the braking of one of the trains, gas accumulated in the low area and an instant explosion occurred. Rock is rock. And our carelessness, of course...

I worked at the scene of the accident, together with the KGB and the military, studying the causes of the disaster. By the end of the day, June 5, we knew that this was not sabotage, it was a wild accident... Indeed, the smell of gas was felt by both the residents of a nearby village and our drivers... As an inspection showed, the gas accumulated there for 20-25 days. And all this time there were trains going there! As for the product pipeline, it turned out that there was no control there, despite the fact that the relevant services are obliged to regularly monitor the condition of the pipe. After this disaster, instructions appeared for all our drivers: if they smell gas, they should immediately warn and stop train traffic until the circumstances are clarified. Such a terrible lesson was needed...

Vladislav Zagrebenko, in 1989 - resuscitator at the regional clinical hospital:

At seven in the morning we took off with the first helicopter. It took three hours to fly. They didn’t know where to sit at all. They sat me near the trains. From above I saw (draws) such a clearly defined circle with a diameter of about a kilometer, and black stumps of pine trees stick out like matchsticks. Around the taiga. The carriages lie bent in the shape of a banana. There are helicopters there like flies. Hundreds. By that time there were no sick people or corpses left. The military did a perfect job: they evacuated people, took away the corpses, and put out the fire.

There was one girl there. She is similar in age to my daughter. There was no head, only two teeth stuck out from below. Black as a frying pan. I thought I would recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs up to her torso. And she was similar in body. I then reproached myself, it was possible to tell by my blood type and by my collarbone, which I broke in childhood... In that state it didn’t dawn on me. Or maybe it was her... There are a lot of unidentified “fragments” of people left.

The investigation into this case was conducted by the Union Prosecutor's Office, and from the very beginning the investigation came to the attention of very eminent persons: the leaders of the industry design institute, who approved the project with violations, Dongaryan, the Deputy Minister of the Oil Industry, who, by his instructions, in view of saving money, canceled telemetry devices, which control the operation of the entire highway. I saw this document with his signature. Previously, there was a helicopter that flew over the entire route, but that was also canceled. There was a lineman - they also removed the lineman, also to save money. And then for some reason the investigation switched to the builders: they installed it incorrectly, they are to blame for everything. This product pipeline was built by the Ufa department “Nefteprovodmontazh”. At first, the leaders were brought in, and then they were given an amnesty, since they were order bearers, and they were only present as witnesses. And 7 people were accused of everything: the head of the site, the foreman... "

Original taken from schnause at the age of 25. June 4, 1989. Disaster in Chelyabinsk.

June 4, 2014 marks 25 years since a railway transport disaster of a monstrous scale and casualties occurred. 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.

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

Trains No. 211 Novosibirsk-Adler (20 cars) and No. 212 Adler-Novosibirsk (18 cars) carried 1,284 passengers, including 383 children and 86 people from train and locomotive crews.

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

Significant passengers traveling to Adler were already looking forward to a quiet holiday at sea. Those who, on the contrary, were already returning from vacation, were driving towards them. The explosion, which occurred in the middle of the night, is estimated by experts as equivalent to an explosion of three hundred tons of TNT. According to unofficial data, the power of the explosion in Ulu-Telyak was approximately the same as in Hiroshima - about 12 kilotons.

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

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

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

Memoirs of an eyewitness.

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 of railway tracks and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. 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 relatives 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, Supreme Council USSR, 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. During the passage of two oncoming passenger trains with destinations Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk, a large explosion and fire occurred. There are numerous victims.

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.

Disaster on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Here's 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 moment 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 railway station Asha. 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.

Explosion on a summer night.

As a result of the leak, gas gradually accumulated in the ravine and its concentration increased. 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 her with first aid. 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.

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, and 299 people were in serious condition. 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, train 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, those who were lying on upper shelves, - thrown onto the embankment.

The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time.

A giant flash was seen tens of kilometers away

This is still a mystery terrible disaster worries astrologers, scientists, and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met at dangerous place, where did the product pipeline leak? 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.

Flames shot up into the sky, it became as bright as day, we thought, they dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky Department of Internal Affairs and a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. “We rushed to the fire in cars and tractors. Equipment on steep slope I couldn’t get up. 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.

They tried to carry the children out first,” says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. “The adults were simply dragged 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 arms, 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 and asked for something to drink, burnt skin stuck to the seats, and many did not survive the journey.

Cars couldn’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 was so healthy and 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 transported on tractors,” recalled the chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm, Sergei Kosmakov. - The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children bandaged 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. No one knew where to go, Ulu-Telyak is 90 km from Ufa. The cars just went to the torch...

We got out of the car 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 Children's Republican Hospital in Ufa.

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 were falling 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.

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. They were sorted according to the principle of 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, civil defense soldiers continued to remove the remains of flesh fused into the iron from the cars with cutters. In a separate pile they put things found in the area - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason whole and unharmed, not even 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.

His daughter was not on the living lists, he would 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.” As in 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 all. 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 telephone number of Hospital No. 21.

Nadya Shugaeva, a milkmaid from the Novosibirsk region, suddenly begins to laugh 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 the 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 occurred due to a crack caused to it four years before the disaster, in October 1985, by an excavator bucket during construction work. The product pipeline was backfilled with mechanical damage. The case was sent for further investigation.

Six years later, the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan sentenced all defendants to two years in a penal colony. 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 the volunteers' endurance and physical strength, 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:

Is this not our Lenochka? - they said, crowding around a black piece of meat.

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

How did the parents manage to identify native body, remained a mystery to others.

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 with 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 set in 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.

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

Why should we look for you? - they were surprised there, but 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 track, 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 the heck 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 stupefaction - 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 saving the living, they tore 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, the outraged local residents would tear 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 hockey team, two-time national champions.

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

Of the ten hockey players who were 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, pupils 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.

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. It was in the hospital that he met his 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 is left of the man, and in the middle a tie pin shines - 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 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 along 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.