‘We are burning’: Schoolchildren among 64 dead in Siberia mall fire
At least 64 people, many believed to be children, perished in the Siberian city of Kemerovo as an engulfing fire swept through a crowded shopping center where fire exits had been blocked, officials said Monday.
An entire class of schoolchildren apparently died in the fire, some having had the chance to make desperate, futile phone calls to parents or relatives before succumbing to the smoke and flames.
Russian social networks were flooded with grief, and a measure of anger over the response. The disastrous blaze joins a long list of accidents, fires and sinkings in Russia marked by apparent negligence beforehand and inept or insufficient response by emergency services.
“We are burning, perhaps this is goodbye,” a 13-year-old named Maria posted on her social media account, according to the Rossiya-24 televsion channel. Hers was one of about 30 goodbyes posted by children who would not log into their accounts again.
“There are no accurate lists,” the television reporter said, “but the parents are holding on to the hope that the names of their children will be moved from the list of the dead to those missing.”
The fire broke out Sunday afternoon, the first day of a weeklong school break. A class from a school in the small town of Treschevsky had come to Kemerovo to see a movie at the Winter Cherry mall, eat ice cream and jump on a trampoline. On Monday, parents of the students visited hospitals in hope of finding their children. The director of the school, Pavel Orynsky, broke down into tears while describing the students on camera.
A woman named Yevgenia told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that her niece Vika called her at 4:11, right after the fire broke out, from the movie theater where so many of the children from Treschevsky found themselves trapped.
“She told me that everything was on fire, that all the doors were blocked,” Yevgenia said, struggling to overcome her tears. Vika told Yevgenia over the phone that she couldn’t breathe. “I told her: Vika, take off all your clothes, take them to your nose and breathe through them.”
“Please tell mom that I loved her,” Vika replied, “please tell everyone that I loved them.”
That was the last Yevgenia heard from her niece.
In other corners of the Russian media, anger toward the emergency services for their handling of the disaster found a platform. An interview with Alexander Lillevyali published by Meduza, an independent outlet, recounted a father’s attempts to save his daughters from the burning theater while first responders geared up and struggled to commit to a course of action.
“They took three minutes — three (expletive) minutes! — to put on their masks,” Lillevyali said, also with tears in his eyes. The firefighters initially followed him to the staircase leading to the theater, but they were redirected by a man who told them of another fire. He then begged them to give him a mask so he could return to the theater and save the girls himself.
“They told me: Can’t do it. Everything has to be according to regulations,” Lillevyali recalled. “My girls were left to burn because of the goddamn regulations.”
Within hours of opening an investigation into the cause of the fire, the Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said authorities were looking into several “serious violations” of fire safety codes. Petrenko said fire exits were blocked, and a private security guard turned off the fire alarm after receiving notice of the fire.
Kemerovo is nearly 2,000 miles east of Moscow. On social media, friends and family shared photos of children believed to have been at the mall when the fire broke out.
The Kommersant newspaper reported that 288 firefighters arrived with 62 firetrucks to battle the blaze.