There are incidents, so to speak, expected, like wildfires in Siberia. The relevant services are preparing for them for a long time and carefully, they warn the population that it is impossible to burn dry grass and throw unstuffed cigarette butts in the forest. Despite preventive measures, forest fires still happen every year, and we, unfortunately, are already used to it. But at the same time, here and there around the world sometimes completely unexpected and even mysterious incidents occur, the reasons for which often remain unclear even for the investigating authorities.
People were hanging in the trees …
One of such mysterious cases occurred on December 25, 1967 in Moscow, on Osipenko Street, at about ten in the evening. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the five-story building No. 77 collapsed, burying 147 people under the ruins.
This is how a resident of N. Gudkova's house, who miraculously survived this disaster, described the incident: “I was watching TV. Suddenly he jumped, and I myself climbed to the ceiling. The planks in the floor were bent. The chest of drawers unfolded. Then I shook again, I lost consciousness - and woke up already on the street … Glasses were falling all around. And some of the residents were thrown very far away - to the Krasnokholmsky Bridge ….
Another resident of house No. 77, A. Drozdova, later recalled: “I did the laundry. Suddenly, the water from the bathtub rose and splashed out along with the laundry. I was thrown and hit against the wall. The bathroom floor was bulging. A refrigerator, TV, wardrobe fell in the room, and I don't remember anything else. When I came to, I saw how people were hanging in the trees ….
The force of gravity is gone
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A special commission investigating this tragedy immediately put forward a version that the explosion of household gas was the cause of the disaster. However, the investigation did not manage to find the exact place where this explosion took place. The situation was further confused by the testimony of eyewitnesses who were on the street, who assured that at the time of the incident in the house, as if suddenly completely … According to them, something amazing was observed: the three upper floors of the house seemed to separate from the lower ones, went up and … hung in the air. Only after a few seconds they fell apart, already falling down. In the crash, only people who lived on the upper three floors died, but the residents of the first and second floors, almost all survived.
Physicists, who were involved in the analysis of this case more than once, have concluded that the consequences of this nightmare incident are completely different from those that occur in an explosion of household gas. It was suggested that at that point in the earth's crust at that moment there was an unexpected release of energy from the underground fault. Experts called this phenomenon a gravitational explosion. And upon further analysis of the situation, surprising data were discovered: in 1932, at the same place, and again for no apparent reason, a bakery suddenly exploded. The reason for its destruction could not be established then either. Moreover, a similar incident happened here in 1902, when, in front of passers-by, an apartment building unexpectedly fell into the ground together with its tenants. And again - no apparent reason for what happened. By the way, in 1902,and in 1932 these buildings were not supplied with gas …
And on the site of the collapsed house No. 77, a public garden was soon laid out, and 147 trees were planted in it - according to the number of people killed. Osipenko Street was then renamed into Sadovnicheskaya.
Tragedy at the radio plant
Another mysterious explosion took place on March 10, 1972 in the case shop of the Minsk Radio Plant, where the scarce Horizon television sets were being produced at that time. This enterprise was not at all associated with the production of explosives, and any chemically aggressive compounds were never used here. Nevertheless, the unexpected disaster claimed 104 lives, and more than 300 workers of the plant were injured of varying severity. The incident in Minsk turned out to be the largest accident that happened on the territory of the Byelorussian SSR in the post-war period, both in terms of the number of victims and the scale of destruction.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that the explosion occurred just at the junction between the first and second shifts, when many workers and employees were simultaneously present at the plant. The explosion in a split second turned into ruins a two-story reinforced concrete building of the case workshop. He was heard even a few kilometers from the site of the tragedy. The fire was minimal, but many people were inundated with the rubble of the building and collapsed equipment. In the first minutes, local residents and people who happened to be near the crash site provided all possible assistance to the victims. Later, firefighters, police and army units arrived at the scene and cordoned off the scene.
Is it all about dust?
The rescue operation was complicated by the fact that the city did not have enough equipment to disassemble the resulting rubble. Moreover, just on the eve of the catastrophe, severe frosts hit Belarus, and therefore many victims died not even from injuries, but from hypothermia, without waiting for help. However, during the rescue operation, there was a unique case when one of the workers, Valery Solovyov, was removed alive from the rubble almost three days after the disaster.
The investigation, which began immediately after the tragedy, has been marking time for quite some time. The put forward version of the explosion of natural gas was soon recognized as untenable, since the plant simply never consumed the necessary amount of gas. As a result, the main cause of the disaster was called the smallest dust, which is formed during the process of grinding the varnish used to “cover TV cases. According to the investigation, for many years it accumulated in such quantities in the factory ventilation that at that tragic moment it exploded in the entire shop from some accidental spark, which caused the disaster.
Despite the fact that a number of experts called this version far-fetched and even far-fetched, the state commission, for lack of a better explanation, recognized it as the only cause of the tragedy that killed more than a hundred people. As a result of the investigation, some of the leaders responsible for the accurate operation of the ventilation, as well as the plant director and chief engineer, were convicted. They were all accused of official negligence, which led to serious consequences. And the destroyed case shop of the Minsk Radio Plant was never rebuilt later.
Gas in the basement
It happened on May 7, 1991 in Russkiye Lipyagi, a former suburb of Novokuibyshevsk, Samara region. A young woman Irina Zabrodina, who came to visit her mother, who lived in a private house, went down to the cellar for potatoes in the afternoon. But ten minutes passed, half an hour passed, and Irina did not return from the cellar and did not answer her mother's cries. Then the hostess called for help from two neighboring men, who also went down to the cellar and did not return either. Only then it became clear that there, under the floor of a private house, some ridiculous tragedy had taken place.
Only in the evening a team of gas rescuers from the city gas service removed the bodies of Irina Zabrodina and two neighbors, who had turned blue from suffocation. The conclusion of the forensic medical examination read: poisoning with a mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons. But where the deadly gas suddenly appeared in the cellar with potatoes and pickles, then no one could understand.
An active investigation of this incident began after three days later, on May 10, another similar tragedy followed in Russkiye Lipyagi. Another resident of the suburbs went to his cellar for potatoes in the same way - and did not come home either. After this incident, an emergency commission was created in the Novokuibyshevsk City Council, which, in the course of a thorough analysis of the situation, established that lethal concentrations of gaseous hydrocarbons in suburban cellars and basements arose … due to their seepage from a huge gasoline lake, which formed in karst voids, in the bowels of the earth under the neighboring Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery. It turned out that for many decades, oil products constantly penetrated underground from numerous leaks and breakthroughs of factory pipelines. Now environmentalists consider these incidents in Novokuibyshevsk to be unique in their way: for the first time, the cause of death of people was not the pollution of the atmosphere, which happened before, but the underground horizons. And in Novokuibyshevsk, after everything that happened, energetic measures were taken to prevent new tragedies. At the plant, in the shortest possible time, special installations were introduced that pump out oil products from underground horizons, and in the city … gas rescuers were put on duty, ready at the first call of citizens to go down to their cellars for potatoes or cabbage. At the plant, in the shortest possible time, special installations were introduced that pump out oil products from underground horizons, and in the city … gas rescuers were put on duty, ready at the first call of citizens to go down to their cellars for potatoes or cabbage. At the plant, in the shortest possible time, special installations were introduced that pump out oil products from underground horizons, and in the city … gas rescuers were put on duty, ready at the first call of citizens to go down to their cellars for potatoes or cabbage.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №36. Author: Valery Erofeev
