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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Major fire at Russia arms depot |
| 2009-11-14 |
| At least two people have been killed after a series of explosions and fires at a weapons depot in central Russia, officials say. The blasts ripped through the defence ministry navy depot on the outskirts of Ulyanovsk when soldiers attempted to decommission munitions. The officials later said that 43 people who were feared dead had been found safe in a bomb shelter near the site. Some 3,000 people were evacuated from the surrounding area. The depot is about 900km (550 miles) south-east of the capital Moscow. Officials said artillery shells and torpedoes were kept at the arsenal, adding that a nearby chemicals weapons depot was not in any danger. A criminal investigation into the accident is now under way. Ulyanovsk sits beside the Volga river and is the birthplace of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose |
| #6 "VIDEO" Great fireworks display, 3dc - thanks. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2009-11-14 23:56 |
| #5 That's ok, 3dc. People don't go off the way that tightly packed explosives do, so the explosion would no doubt damp off fairly quickly once it got into the neighborhoods. :-( |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-11-14 21:29 |
| #4 Note it is in the middle of a city of 600K people. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2009-11-14 16:36 |
| #3 Mike K - always telling stories that warm my cockles. Don't stop! |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-11-14 16:35 |
| #2 VIDEO |
| Posted by: 3dc 2009-11-14 16:30 |
| #1 ...Nice to see the The last big accident there was in 84 or 85 at the primary weapons storage site for the Soviet Atlantic Fleet near Murmansk. That one was a hoot: 1)Two vehicle carrying ammo run head on into each other (ALL Western WSAs/bomb dumps have one way traffic patterns - cuts down on this sort of thing) 2)They explode in front of a storage building whose protective doors are open (apparently the doors either didn't close well or could'nt close at all) 3)The ammo in the building goes up and takes the buildings next to it with them, starting a chain reaction of all the storage buildings. (Western sites use Quantity/Distance requirements that keep this sort of thing from happening - I saw the results of a Daisy Cutter cooking off inside a mag in CA many years ago, and although the building was replaced with a 75 ft crater the mags on either side were damaged beyond repair but protected the ammo inside) 3)A spectacular visual display that was - at first - mistaken for a low yield nuclear detonation. So much ammo went up that for about a year, the Soviet Atlantic Fleet was pretty much incapable of combat operations. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2009-11-14 13:16 |