Kamyshevatskaya, Russia Fire swept through a nursing home in southern Russia after the night watchman ignored two alarms today, killing 62 people in a town where the closest fire station was nearly an hour’s drive away, officials said.
Too feeble to escape on their own, some of the elderly knocked on the windows seeking aid, according to a local man who said he helped evacuate people from the two-story brick building in the Azov Sea coast village of Kamyshevatskaya.
“I rushed here, saw the flames and started to help people get out from the second floor,” Yevgeny Solomin told NTV.
“But what could we do?” he said. “Do you know how hard it is to get someone down a ladder from the second floor? If only firefighters had been here.”
The firehouse in Kamyshevatskaya closed last year, and the firefighters had to come from a town about 30 miles away, emergency officials said.
Russian television networks showed footage of the building’s blacked exterior walls, charred wheelchairs and a first-floor room that was gutted and covered in ash.
Besides the dead, 35 were injured, regional emergency official Sergei Petrov said, adding that 97 people were in the building when the fire broke out, including four employees. Acting Krasnodar regional governor Murat Akhedzhak said 30 people were hospitalized and that their lives were not in danger.
The fire happened less than 24 hours after a methane gas explosion at a Siberian coal mine killed more than 100 people in Russia’s deadliest mining disaster in a decad
