Fire at a Russian School Kills 28 Deaf Boys

From: New York Times - Apr 10, 2003

By MICHAEL WINES

MOSCOW, April 10 - Asleep and unable to hear the frantic shouts of adults, 28 deaf boys perished early today after a fire consumed their boarding school in the Caspian Sea city of Makhachkala in the Russian province of Dagestan.

At least 106 other boys were injured, 22 critically.

It was the second major school fire in four days, coming on the heels of a blaze in Siberia that killed 22 children in a gymnasium dressing room. Today's disaster left average Russians stunned and enraged over the perilous state of poorly maintained school buildings.

"All Russians are grieving," President Vladimir V. Putin said today. "These were our children. It is our tragedy."

Officials in Dagestan said the fire, which may have stemmed from electrical problems, broke out around 2:20 a.m. in the two-story school, which housed 159 boys between the ages of 7 and 14 in a second-floor dormitory.

Only about 25 children escaped unscathed, some by jumping out of windows, the television network RTR reported.

Teachers struggled for several minutes to awaken children before giving up and summoning firefighters, who were unable to control a fire that was whipped by high winds. Within two and a half hours, the building had burned virtually to the ground, the Interfax news service reported.

A nearby resident who helped battle the fire told Agence France-Presse that many children were missed during the evacuation because they were out of sight, hiding under their beds.

Firefighters were hampered because one pumping truck arrived without water and because they had no ladders tall enough to reach the second floor, the neighbor was quoted as saying. That report could not be independently confirmed.

Officials said most of the children probably died from smoke inhalation. The injured suffered from smoke inhalation, burns and carbon monoxide poisoning.

Russian prosecutors opened a criminal investigation, but officials said the most likely cause of the fire was damaged electrical wiring or a short circuit, perhaps related to high winds that had blown down power lines and caused an electrical outage earlier in the evening.

The fire was the second major disaster involving children to strike this southwest Russian province in 11 months. On May 9, a bomb filled with shrapnel exploded in Kaspiisk, a few miles south of Makhachkala, during a parade marking the end of World War II. At least 41 people, 17 of them schoolchildren, died in the blast, which was blamed on antigovernment guerrillas.

The regional government in Dagestan declared a day of mourning on Friday, when all the dead are to be buried. Some officials said the toll could still rise because a number of surviving children were seriously burned.

The regional government said it would give 100,000 rubles, or about $3,200, to each family of a dead child, and half that to each surviving child. Legislators in the local parliament and many other government workers were contributing a day's pay to a fund for the victims, Russian news services reported.

The Russian government this morning ordered a plane filled with medicine, equipment and experts from the Catastrophe Medical Center and the Moscow City Children's Hospital to be flown to Makhachkala.

Prime Minister Mikhail M. Kasyanov demanded that safety standards be stiffened in schools, saying fires like the two this week had become "a systemic problem" in Russia's vast state-run and badly underfinanced education system.

The government's Ministry of Civil Defense, Emergencies and Natural Disasters said it would work with the Education Ministry to upgrade fire-safety equipment and procedures at schools across the country.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company