Tight security blamed for deaths in Moscow fire

updated 5:56 p.m. ET Dec. 9, 2006

MOSCOW - The locked gates and barred windows that kept 45 women from escaping a fire early Saturday at a drug treatment center pointed to conditions now common in post-Soviet Russia’s state-run institutions.

An official described a scene that hinted at horrific panic as patients struggled to escape the fire — Moscow’s deadliest in decades.

“Judging by the placement of the bodies, they really tried to get out,” said Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Chupriyan. He said all 45 victims — reportedly 43 patients and two staffers — were dead by the time firefighters arrived.

Inspectors who visited the hospital in February and March had recommended its temporary closure because of safety violations, said Russia’s chief fire inspector Yuri Nenashev.

Experts say fire deaths have skyrocketed in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in part because a disregard for safety standards. Russia records about 18,000 fire deaths a year — roughly 10 times the rate in the United States.

The fire erupted in a wooden cabinet in a kitchen at one end of a second-floor corridor, officials said. The main exit was blocked by a locked gate that staff members could not open in time, and the only other way out was cut off by smoke, Nenashev said.

Windows couldn't be opened
The barred windows were shut with locks that hospital personnel, who had the keys, did not manage to open, said Maj. Gen. Viktor Klimkin, Moscow’s top fire safety oversight official.

Patients blamed tight security measures — meant to keep patients in — for the high death toll. A psychologist at the hospital, Olga Rudakova, said security measures were severe because drug addiction was considered a psychiatric problem.

“There are bars on the windows, and when the fire broke out the lights went out and there was panic — they could not open them,” she said.

Emergency response officials ordered all health facilities in Moscow inspected for fire safety compliance, Russian agencies reported.

Maxim Marmur / AFP - Getty Images Russian firemen leave a drug rehabilitation hospital in Moscow early Saturday after a suspected arson fire raced through the facility.

Televised footage showed ravaged, peeling corridor walls, and black ash covering beds and belongings in one room — a teacup and some buns. NTV showed an exhausted, soot-covered survivor sitting outside the building next to the sprawled figures of two women who appeared dead or unconscious.

The prosecutor’s office said the fire was small, covering 270 square feet, and Moscow fire department spokesman Yevgeny Bobylyov said most victims had asphyxiated. Some died of burns, Moscow city prosecutor Yuri Syomin said.

Nenashev said he was “90 percent certain” the blaze was deliberately started. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said it appeared to be arson or extremely careless handling of flammable materials. Syomin said investigators were looking into other possibilities, and that the fire might have started in a pile of discarded materials.

The Russian Prosecutor General’s office said repair or refurbishing had been done in the kitchen the day before the fire, and Russian media suggested the blaze could have been caused by flammable substances used for the work.

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