Detonating Munitions Cause Blasts, Fire At Military Depot-DM, Russia
ITAR-TASS, 28 October 2010
Khabarovsk - Fallen box with grenade launcher ammunition, which detonated, resulted in a fire and series of explosions in a depot of a military unit near the station Arga in the Amur region, according to a preliminary version of the investigation into the causes and circumstances of the incident.
Officials of the Defence Ministry reported about the results to governor Oleg Kozhemyako who is at the scene, the regional government's press service told Itar-Tass.
The military put up trucks around the burning depot, in order to limit the dispersal of the fragments and prevent ignition of adjacent warehouses. Since the depot stored mainly ammunition for small arms, the range of the fragments' dispersal did not exceed 50-100 metres. Rescuers ensured safety of the nearby settlements' dwellers. More than 300 people, primarily children, mothers with babies and old people, were evacuated. Now that the threat passed, they are returning to their homes.
Teams of rescuers and squads of fire fighting units, special fire fighting equipment from Blagoveshchensk, Svobodny and other cities of the Amur region were dispatched to the Seryshevsky district. The regional centre's task force headed by chief of the Far Eastern regional centre of the RF Emergency Situations Ministry Major-General Alexander Solovyov, psychologists of an emergency psychological care centre arrived from Khabarovsk. Commander of the 35th Army Igor Turchenyuk is staying at the incident site.
One soldier was injured in the incident, he was hospitalised. The Commission of the Defence Ministry continues is work at the emergency site.
Meanwhile, Defence Ministry servicemen continued the clean-up operations on the fire site at the ammunition depot in the Amur region. A group of experts of engineering troops and 50 servicemen from an engineering sapper battalion have been working there. The condition of the serviceman who received slight burns in the fire is satisfactory, there is no threat to his life, the press service of the Russian Defence Ministry told Itar-Tass earlier. The fire began in the territory of the Belogorsk division of the Far Eastern Military District in a depot, where shells for anti-tank grenade launchers were stored, at around 03:00 a.m., Moscow time, Thursday. The fire scattered shell fragments to a distance not exceeding a hundred meters. Fire brigades extinguished the fire jointly with fire fighters of the Emergency Situations Ministry at about 06:15 a.m., Moscow time.
The Amur region is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast), situated about 8,000 kilometres (5,000 mi) east of Moscow on the banks of the Amur and Zeya Rivers. It shares its border with the Sakha Republic in the north, Khabarovsk Territory and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the east, People's Republic of China in the south, and Trans-Baikal Territory in the west. The Amur region had a population of 869,600 in 2008. In July 2010, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that the area would be the site of a new Vostochny cosmodrome ("Eastern Spaceport"), to reduce Russian dependence on the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
