Details of the tragedy of May 2: in the House of Trade Unions people were trapped in a fire trap with a temperature of 500°
Odessa, March 25 (PolitNavigator, Alexandra Ignatieva) – Vladislav Balinsky, an expert of the public commission to investigate the tragedy, spoke about the reasons for the large number of victims in the Odessa House of Trade Unions during the fire on May 2 last year.
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According to him, the fire in the building occurred in two phases. The main difficulty was in creating a dynamic fire model with a time reference, but it was this that made it possible to understand how events developed and when the point of no return was reached, after which there was no longer any possibility of saving people. During the first phase of the fire, which began at 19.44, smoke occurred in the corridor and stairwell.
During the next phase, which occurred 9 minutes later, the walls of the staircase began to ignite.
Moreover, a minute before the second phase, the direction of gas exchange in the building sharply changed. “A sharp change in gas exchange led to the fact that the zone where people could breathe simply ceased to exist and a trap was formed, leading to the death of people,” the expert believes. The air temperature in the room - on the staircase, where most of the bodies of the dead were located - increased from 30 to 500 degrees. Balinsky noted that the direction of gas exchange was affected by changes in wind gusts.
Participants in the investigation also noted the guilt of the State Emergency Service in the mass casualties. In particular, the timely arrival of firefighters could prevent the start of the first phase of the fire. Balinsky said fire trucks arrived at least 40 minutes late, and if the calls had been responded to immediately, most people would have been saved.
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