June 4, 2012 marks 23 years since a railway transport disaster, monstrous in scale and in terms of 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.

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’s 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 up to 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.
Official version claims that the gas leak from the product pipeline was made 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 outer part pipes of electric leakage currents, the so-called “stray currents” of the railway. 2-3 weeks before the explosion, a micro fistula formed, then, as a result of cooling of the pipe, a crack that grew in length appeared at the point of gas expansion. Liquid condensate soaked the soil at the depth of the trench, without coming out, and gradually went down the slope to the railway.
When the two trains met, probably as a result of braking, a spark occurred, which caused the gas to detonate. But most likely the cause of gas detonation was an accidental spark from under the pantograph of one of the locomotives.
22 years have already passed since this monstrous disaster occurred near Ulu-Telyak. More than 600 people died. How many people were left crippled? Many remained missing. The real culprits of this disaster were never found. The trial lasted more than 6 years, only the “switchmen” were punished. After all, this tragedy could have been avoided, if not for the carelessness and negligence that we encountered then. The drivers reported that there was a strong smell of gas, but no action was taken. We must not forget about this tragedy, the pain that people experienced... Until now, every day we are notified of one or another sad incident. Where, by chance, more than 600 lives were interrupted. For their family and friends, this place on the land of Bashkortostan is the 1710th kilometer along the railway...

In addition, I provide excerpts from Soviet newspapers that wrote about the disaster at that time:

From the Central Committee of the CPSU, 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.
(“Pravda” June 5, 1989)

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

Disaster on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Here is what the Izvestia correspondent was told at the Ministry of Railways: The pipeline on which the disaster occurred runs about a kilometer from the Ufa-Chelyabinsk highway (Kuibyshev railway). At the time of the explosion and the resulting fire, passenger trains 211 (Novosibirsk-Adler) and 212 (Adler-Novosibirsk) were moving towards each other. The impact of the blast wave and flame threw fourteen cars off the track, destroyed the contact network, damaged communication lines and the railway track for several hundred meters. The fire spread to the trains, and the fire was extinguished within a few hours. According to preliminary data, the explosion occurred due to a pipeline rupture Western Siberia– Ural not far from the Asha railway station. Raw materials for Kuibyshev chemical plants are distilled through it. Chelyabinsk. Bashkiria... Its length is 1860 kilometers. According to experts who are now working at the scene of the accident, there was a leak of liquefied propane-butane gas in this area. Here the product pipeline runs through mountainous terrain. Over a period of time, gas accumulated in two deep hollows and, for reasons still unknown, exploded. The front of the rising flame was approximately one and a half to two kilometers. It was possible to extinguish the fire directly on the product pipeline only after all the hydrocarbon that had accumulated at the rupture site had burned out. It turned out that long before the explosion, residents of nearby settlements felt a strong smell of gas in the air. It spread over a distance of approximately 4 to 8 kilometers. Such messages came from the population around 21:00 local time, and the tragedy, as is known, occurred later. However, instead of searching for and eliminating the leak, someone (while the investigation is ongoing) added pressure to the pipeline and the gas continued to spread through the hollows.
(“Pravda” June 6, 1989).

Explosion in summer night.
As a result of the leak, gas gradually accumulated in the ravine 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 heading 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.
(“Soviet Bashkiria” Ufa. June 7, 1989.)

On June 6 in Ufa, a meeting of the government commission was held, headed by Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G.G. Vedernikov. The Minister of Health of the RSFSR A.I. Potapov reported to the commission on urgent measures to provide assistance to those injured as a result of the railway disaster. He reported that as of 7 a.m. on June 6, there were 503 wounded people in Ufa medical institutions, including 115 children, 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, and those who were lying on the upper shelves were thrown onto the embankment.
The clock found in the ashes showed 1.10 local time.
A giant flash was seen tens of kilometers away
Until now, the mystery of this terrible catastrophe worries astrologers, scientists, and experts. How did it happen that two late twin trains Novosibirsk-Adler and Adler-Novosibirsk met 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 surnames 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, we dropped an atomic bomb,” says Anatoly Bezrukov, a local police officer at the Iglinsky Department of Internal Affairs, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - We rushed to the fire in cars and tractors. The equipment could not climb the steep slope. They began to climb the slope - there were pine trees all around like burnt matches. Below we saw torn metal, fallen poles, power transmission masts, pieces of bodies... One woman was hanging on a birch tree with her stomach ripped open. An old man crawled along the slope from the fiery mess, coughing. How many years have passed, and he still stands before my eyes. Then I saw that the man was burning like gas with a blue flame.
At one o'clock in the morning, teenagers who were returning from a disco in the village of Kazayak arrived to help the villagers. The children themselves, amid the hissing metal, helped along with the adults.
“We tried to carry the children out first,” says Ramil Khabibullin, a resident of the village of Kazayak. “The adults were simply pulled away from the fire. And they moan, cry, and ask to be covered with something. What will you cover it with? They took off their clothes.
The wounded, in a state of shock, crawled into the windfall and were searched for by moans and screams.
“They took a man by the hands, by the legs, and his skin remained in his hands...” said Ural driver Viktor Titlin, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. - All night, until the morning, they took the victims to the hospital in Asha.
The driver of the state farm bus, Marat Sharifullin, made three trips, and then began shouting: “I won’t go anymore, I’m bringing only corpses!” Along the way, children screamed, asked for something to drink, burnt skin stuck to the seats, and many did not survive the journey.
“The cars didn’t go up the mountain, we had to carry the wounded on ourselves,” says Marat Yusupov, a resident of the village of Krasny Voskhod. – They were carried on shirts, blankets, seat covers. I remember one guy from the village of Maisky, he, such a healthy man, carried about thirty people. Covered in blood, but did not stop.
Sergei Stolyarov made three trips on an electric locomotive with wounded people. At the Ulu-Telyak station, he, a driver with two months of experience, missed the 212th ambulance and went on a freight train after it. A few kilometers later I saw a huge flame. Having unhooked the oil tanks, he began to slowly drive up to the overturned cars. On the embankment, the overhead wires of the contact network, torn off by the blast wave, curled like snakes. Having taken the burned people into the cabin, Stolyarov moved to the siding and returned to the scene of the disaster with the platform already attached. He picked up children, women, men who had become helpless and loaded, loaded... He returned home - his shirt was like a stake from the clotted blood of someone else.
“All the village equipment arrived, they were transporting it on tractors,” recalled the chairman of the Krasny Voskhod collective farm, Sergei Kosmakov. – The wounded were sent to a rural boarding school, where their children bandaged them...
Specialized help came much later - after one and a half to two hours.
“At 1.45 a.m. the control panel received a call that a carriage was burning near Ulu-Telyak,” says Mikhail Kalinin, senior doctor on the ambulance shift in the city of Ufa. - Ten minutes later they clarified that the entire train had burned out. All duty ambulances were removed from the line and equipped with gas masks. 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 hard to even 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 the atomic bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima,” said Sergei Kosmakov, chairman of the “Red Sunrise” village council. - We ran to the scene of the explosion - trees fell as if in a vacuum - to the center of the explosion. The shock wave was so powerful that glass was broken in all houses within a 12-kilometer radius. We found pieces from the carriages at a distance of six kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion.
“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 the soldiers civil defense They continued to use cutters to remove the remains of flesh fused into the iron from the cars. In a separate pile they put things found in the area - children's toys and books, bags and suitcases, blouses and trousers, for some reason whole and unharmed, not even singed.
Salavat Abdulin, the father of the deceased high school student Irina, found her hair clip in the ashes, which he himself repaired before the trip, and her shirt.
“The daughter was not on the lists of survivors,” he will recall later. “We searched for her in hospitals for three days. No traces. And then my wife and I went through the refrigerators... There was one girl there. She is similar in age to our daughter. There was no head. Black as a frying pan. I thought I’d recognize her by her legs, she danced with me, she was a ballerina, but there were no legs either...
Two mothers claimed one child at once
And in Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Samara, places in hospitals were urgently released. To bring the wounded from the Asha and Iglino hospitals to Ufa, a helicopter school was used. The cars landed in the city center in Gafuri Park behind the circus - this place in Ufa is still called the “helipad” to this day. The cars took off every three minutes. By 11 am, all the victims were taken to city hospitals.
“The first patient was admitted to us at 6:58 a.m.,” said the head of the burn center in Ufa, Radik Medykhatovich Zinatullin. - From eight in the morning until lunch, there was a massive flow of victims. The burns were deep, almost all of them had burns of the upper respiratory tract. Half of the victims had more than 70% of their bodies burned. Our center had just opened; there were enough antibiotics, blood products, and fibrin film in stock, which is applied to the burned surface. By lunchtime, teams of doctors from Leningrad and Moscow arrived.
There were many children among the victims. I remember one boy had two mothers, each of whom was sure that her son was on the crib...
American doctors, as they learned, flew in from the States, made a round, and said: “No more than 40 percent will survive.” 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 it. Like, he’s still not a tenant. And we saved him! He was one of the last to be discharged, in September.
An unbearable situation reigned at the headquarters these days. Women clung to the slightest hope and did not leave the lists for a long time, fainting right there.
The father and young girl who arrived from Dnepropetrovsk on the second day after the tragedy, unlike other relatives, were glowing with happiness. They came to see their son and husband, a young family with two children.
“We don’t need lists,” they wave it off. “We know he survived.” Pravda wrote on the first page that he saved children. We know what lies in Hospital No. 21.
Indeed, the young officer Andrei Dontsov, who was returning home, became famous when he pulled children out of burning carriages. But the publication stated that the hero had 98% burns.
The wife and father shift from foot to foot, they want to quickly leave the mournful headquarters, where people are crying.
“Pick it up, at the morgue,” says the telephone number of Hospital No. 21.
Nadya Shugaeva, milkmaid from Novosibirsk region suddenly starts laughing hysterically.
- Found it, found it!
The attendants try to smile forcefully. I found my father and brother, sister and young nephew. Found it... on the lists of the dead.

The switchmen were responsible for the disaster.
When the wind was still carrying the ashes of those burned alive, they drove to the scene of the disaster the most powerful technology. 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 handed down a sentence - all defendants were sentenced to two years in a penal settlement. In the dock were the site manager, foreman, foremen, and builders. “Switchmen.”

Afghans worked in the morgue.
Most hard work internationalist warriors took over. 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:
- Isn’t this our Lenochka? - they said, crowding around a black piece of meat.
- No, our Helen had folds on her arms...
How the parents managed to identify their own body remained a mystery to those around them.
In order not to traumatize relatives and protect them from visiting the morgue, terrible photo albums were brought to the headquarters, with photographs from different angles of fragments of unidentified bodies placed on the pages. This terrible collection of death had pages stamped “identified.” However, many still went to the refrigerators, hoping that the photographs lie. And the guys who had recently come from a real war were subjected to suffering that they had not seen while fighting the dushmans. Often the guys were the first to medical care those who fainted and found themselves on the verge of madness from grief, or with impassive faces they helped turn over the charred bodies of their relatives.
“You can’t revive the dead, despair came when the living began to arrive,” the Afghans later said, talking about the most difficult experiences.
The lucky ones were on their own

There were also funny cases.
“In the morning, a man came to the village council from the Novosibirsk train, with a briefcase, in a suit, in a tie - not a single scratch,” said district police officer Anatoly Bezrukov. - He doesn’t remember how he got out of the train that caught fire. I lost my way in the forest at night, unconscious.
Those who were left behind from the train showed up at headquarters.
- Looking for me? - asked the guy who looked into the mournful place on railway station.
- Why should we look for you? – they were surprised, but looked at the lists by rote.
- Eat! – the young man was delighted when he found his name in the column of missing persons.
Alexander Kuznetsov went on a spree a few hours before the tragedy. He went out to drink beer, but he doesn’t remember how the ill-fated train left. I spent a day at the stop, and only when I had sobered up did I learn about what had happened. I got to Ufa and reported that I was alive. At this time, the young man’s mother methodically walked around the morgues, dreaming of finding at least something from her son to bury. Mother and son went home together.
There was no chain of command at the explosion site
Soldiers working on the tracks were given 100 grams of alcohol. It’s hard to imagine how much metal and burnt human flesh they had to shovel. 11 cars were thrown off the 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, oh... did you eat? - a young soldier with an autogenous gun shouts to an elderly man in uniform.
Colonel General Civil Defense carefully lifts his foot from the human jaw.
“Sorry,” he mutters in confusion and disappears into the headquarters, located in the nearest tent.
In this episode, all the contradictory emotions that those present experienced: anger at human weakness before the elements, and confusion - a 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 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, indignant local residents would have torn him to shreds. The young cops shrugged:
- If only they knew that they would have to defend the criminal...

Chelyabinsk has lost its hockey hope.
The 107th school in Chelyabinsk lost 45 people near Ufa, and the Traktor sports club lost its youth team of hockey players, two-time national champions.
Only goalkeeper Borya Tortunov was forced to stay at home: his grandmother broke her arm.
Of the ten hockey players - champions of the Union among regional national teams - only one survived, Alexander Sychev, who later played for the Mechel club. The pride of the team - striker Artem Masalov, defenders Seryozha Generalgard, Andrei Kulazhenkin, and goalkeeper Oleg Devyatov were not found at all. The youngest of the hockey team, Andrei Shevchenko, lived the longest of the burned guys, five days. On June 15 he would have celebrated his sixteenth birthday.
“My husband and I managed to see him,” says Andrei’s mother Natalya Antonovna. - We found him according to the lists in the intensive care unit of the 21st hospital in Ufa. “He lay there like a mummy, covered in bandages, his face was gray-brown, his neck was all swollen. On the plane, when we were taking him to Moscow, he kept asking: “Where are the guys?” In the 13th hospital - a branch of the Institute named after. We wanted to christen Vishnevsky, but we didn’t have time. The doctors injected him with holy water three times through a catheter... He left us on the day of the Ascension of the Lord - he died quietly, unconscious.
The Traktor club, a year after the tragedy, organized a tournament dedicated to the memory of the deceased hockey players, which became traditional. The goalkeeper of the deceased Traktor-73 team, Boris Tortunov, who then stayed at home because of his grandmother, became a two-time champion of the country and the European Cup. On his initiative, 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. varying degrees severity, of which 317 died in hospitals. A total of 575 people died and 623 were injured.

Today we will talk about the largest railway accident near Ufa, on the Asha-Ulu-Telyak section, in 1989.

“The train accident near Ufa is the largest 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 section.

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.

On June 4, 1989, at 01:15 local time (June 3 at 23:15 Moscow time), at the moment of the meeting of two passenger trains, a powerful volumetric gas explosion thundered and a gigantic fire broke out.”

People had already gone to bed, many were undressed... the carriages were filled with passengers. There were many children and schoolchildren traveling on the trains. Therefore, after the explosion, many, even the survivors, were undressed... To say that people and children were in a state of shock is to say nothing... The children with 90% of body burns, being in shock, regretted that they had not reached the sea, asked to give something to my mother, they asked where the watch was, what was on my hand, where was the toy... and five minutes later they died. The adults did not understand what was happening, they thought that a war had started, they were bombing, and were hiding in the forest. They were afraid of repeated blows.

Parents considered it lucky, no matter how blasphemous it may sound, if they found the body of a child, because many parents whose children were traveling alone (schoolchildren, teenagers) were given simply fragments of clothes, bodies, or nothing... some never found the missing ones.

Residents of nearby houses set up infirmaries in their houses, windows were broken in the houses, the walls were splattered with blood, stained with ash, and saturated with smoke. Eyewitnesses say that they swept fingers and fragments of bodies from houses where they were brought by the blast wave. The explosion was so powerful.

In total, 1,284 passengers (including 383 children) and 86 members of train and locomotive crews traveled on the trains.

At least 575 people died (more than 1,000 people were injured - on the platform as well, 623 were left disabled), but it is clear that there were more, since many of the dead remained missing, their ashes scattered in the night air of a random village.

That is, a few of those caught up in that ill-fated tragedy remained safe and relatively unharmed, mainly those who survived received varying degrees of damage and remained disabled.

Eyewitnesses spoke of a black mushroom rising into the sky after the explosion, of scorched forests kilometers away from the disaster... of hundreds of fragments of burnt human bodies, of children dying without help.

The main mechanical cause of the explosion was called damage to the gas pipeline by an excavator bucket (as a result of an accumulated cloud of gas and a spark from the close movement of two trains, an explosion occurred), they found the “switchmen”, imprisoned them for a couple of years, then released them on probation...

The personnel on duty, having noticed a decrease in pressure in the gas pipeline several hours before the disaster (even freight train drivers more than once reported to dispatchers about heavy gas pollution in this section), instead of looking for a leak, they increased the pressure even more, and a lot of gas accumulated in the pocket of the section. The fire could have started from a cigarette thrown out the window.

Among the political versions, sabotage and a terrorist attack were again considered, all with the same goals as during the 1988 tragedy in Arzamas (provocations of the West, undermining the country’s authority). After all, it is impossible to believe in mysticism when tragedies occur on the same day a year apart... It is unlikely that this is a coincidence.

But whatever the political goals, the fact of the carelessness of the staff on duty and service workers is again obvious. What exactly was the reason we will never know, however human factor played a fatal role in this tragedy - this is obvious.

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

An object: 1710 kilometer of the Trans-Siberian Railway, section Asha - Ulu-Telyak, Kuibyshev 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 included in the secret American program on 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 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 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.

Complete work to restore the tracks (after all, this is the Trans-Siberian Railway, its stop is 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 (remember 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; 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 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 remained disabled in various categories. 258 people died on the spot, but no one undertakes to say that this exact numbers: People were literally torn apart by the explosion, their bodies mixed with earth and twisted metal, and most of the remains discovered 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 was carried out by 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 (except for the crash at the Vereshchevka station in 1944, about which only fragmentary information is available) that 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.

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Subtitles

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 Kuibyshevskaya railway, 1710th kilometer of the highway, 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 glass 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

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

Versions of the accident

The official version claims 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.

Consequences

On the afternoon of June 4, the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR M. S. Gorbachev and members of the government commission arrived at the scene of the explosion. Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR G. G. Vedernikov was appointed chairman of the commission to investigate the Ufa explosion. In memory of those killed, a one-day mourning was declared in the country on June 5.

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.

Eyewitness accounts

Gennady Verzyan, resident of Asha (11 kilometers from the explosion):

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.

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 at all, it was a wild accident... Indeed, both the residents of a nearby village and our drivers could smell the gas... 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) this clearly defined circle with a diameter of about a kilometer, and black stumps of pine trees stick out like matchsticks. There is taiga all around. There are carriages, bent like bananas. 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.

The sick were brought in on dump trucks, on trucks side by side: alive, not so alive, not at all alive. They loaded it in the dark. They were sorted according to the principle of military medicine. The seriously wounded - 100 percent of burns - on the grass. There is no time for pain relief, this is the law: if you help one difficult patient, you will lose twenty.

I especially want to say about the Ashino residents. Each patient had a volunteer on duty, but you couldn’t get so many nurses, and there was still a queue to take this place. They carried cutlets, potatoes, everything the wounded asked for... It is known that these patients need to drink a lot. But I couldn’t imagine so many compotes: all the window sills were covered, the entire floor. The area in front of the building was filled with volunteers. All of Asha rose to help.

Salavat Abdulin, father of Lena Abdulina, who died near Asha, co-chairman of the Association of relatives of those killed and injured near Asha:

At the station we were told that the last carriages in which our children were traveling were not damaged. Someone said that teacher Tulupov, who went with them, called and said that everything was fine. They simply reassured us.

At six in the evening we went by special train to Asha, from Asha to Ufa. The daughter was not on the list of living ones. We spent three days searching in hospitals. No traces. And then my wife and I went through the refrigerators...

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. […]

24 people from our school were not found at all, 21 people died. 9 people survived. Not a single teacher was found.

Valery Mikheev, deputy editor of the newspaper "Steel Spark", Asha:

I was woken up - and I had just laid down - 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... And how many children there were! Paramedics began to arrive after us. We put the living on one side and the dead on the other. I remember carrying a little girl, she kept asking me about her mother. I handed it over to a doctor I know - let’s bandage it! He replies: “Valerka, that’s it already...” - “How is that all, I was just talking?!” - “It’s shocking.”

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

The ill-fated pipeline

Another negligence

Accident

Consequences