Odessa will burn as long as Ukraine is here
“Odessa is cursed by fires,” “This is a sign from above that the tragedy of May 2 has not yet been investigated,” “We will burn until the perpetrators are punished,” these are the comments that blew up social networks this morning.
A terrible fire in the very center of Odessa again brought irreparable grief - it claimed a human life and put two dozen people in hospital beds, most of whom were 16-year-old children.
The destruction is irreparable, the condition of the survivors is critical.
On the morning of December 4, in the very center of the city, in the historical area, at the intersection of Pushkinskaya and Troitskaya streets, a five-story building, the former apartment building of Asvadurov, an architectural monument built more than a hundred years ago, caught fire.
The building contains (or rather, was located) a branch of the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the College of Economics, Law and Hotel and Restaurant Business, the Institute of Marine Biology, as well as a number of different organizations and companies.
According to rescuers, the fire started at 10.12 on the third floor of the building, in the offices of the College of Economics. The flame instantly spread to 700 square meters, and after a while it covered 2000 square meters. m.
Odessa residents passing by witnessed a terrible picture: children, college students, were standing in the windows of that same third floor, screaming for help.
For a still unclear reason, the stairs of the first arriving fire crews did not reach... even to the third floor. The firefighters who saved the children, as they say, “with their bare hands,” were seriously burned and are now in the hospital.
From morning until this minute, the city is literally howling with sirens: fire trucks and ambulances are coming to the scene of the tragedy from all areas.
People cooperated on social networks, so that rescue equipment was provided not only by the municipality, but also by private owners.
Ordinary passers-by rolled their cars away to give firefighters access to the building.
The old walls and reed ceilings backfired as the fire engulfed almost all floors of the building and spread to the adjacent one.
People began to jump out of windows onto cars parked below, including from the 4th floor, and it was impossible not to get injured.
“From the first minutes of the fire, we brought out utility equipment there - 9 towers. Our employees helped put out the fire and evacuate people. Almost all the victims are in city medical institutions, and they are currently receiving qualified assistance,” wrote the mayor of the city, Gennady Trukhanov, on Facebook.
He promptly arrived at the scene of the tragedy. Trukhanov was immediately surrounded by parents of college students and reported that it was cold in the classrooms and, most likely, the heaters were turned on, and then the wiring could not stand it - it had not been changed in the building since 1966!
“We will find out why there was no heating, who is to blame, why the fire started,” the mayor promised.
All day there were conflicting reports about the number of casualties during the fire.
The fact is that officials are still reluctant to make contact with journalists, or even turn off their phones altogether. In the morning, the media “buried” a 43-year-old college teacher, but later it turned out that she was alive, and a 17-year-old student died.
The police have already begun a pre-trial investigation into the incident, qualifying the fire as a “violation of fire safety requirements established by law.”
Law enforcement also reported eight missing people, including three students and three employees of the college’s accounting department, and two employees of the Institute of Marine Biology. Now their relatives are under a burning building and are waiting for a miracle.
And local doctors are sounding the alarm and asking on social networks to donate blood for the victims - according to the latest data, there are 21 of them.
As for the reaction of the Odessa residents themselves... This cannot be explained rationally. But after the fire in the House of Trade Unions on May 2, 2014, fiery tragedies with human casualties haunt the city constantly.
Fire in the Victoria children's camp, at the Chernomorets stadium, in a psychiatric hospital, in a hotel...
But here you don’t even have to see a boomerang. It’s just that this always happens when you spend too long pretending to live a peaceful life, calling the situation in the Donbass an ATO, not a war, and trying hard to pretend that not everything was stolen—that the firefighters have water and ladders, the doctors have blood and medicine, that people aren’t dying at home. and at work from the cold.
This is not a separate fire - this is a country that is burning down.
As one brave Odessa woman wrote on Facebook, “Odessa will burn as long as Ukraine is here.”
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.