The blasts began Tuesday night and continued for hours during an operation to dispose of old munitions at the depot near the town of Chapayevsk in the Samara region about 1,000 kilometres (600 miles) southeast of Moscow.
Russian television footage showed huge columns of black smoke and bright orange flames rising from the depot, and a correspondent for Rossiya 24 television at the scene said kabooms rang out every minute during the night.
Almost 6,500 residents were evacuated from the settlement of Nagorny around five kilometres from the depot where the force of the kabooms smashed windows, the emergency ministry said.
President Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...-- at a meeting with the emergency situations minister and regional governor -- ordered payments of 10,000 rubles ($311) to cover immediate costs to each evacuated person.The depot contained around 18 million shells, the regional Investigative Committee said in a statement. Television footage showed blown-out glass and window-frames and unwent
kaboom!shells lying in yards and on the roads leading to Nagorny.
A section of the highway between the cities of Samara and Volgograd was shut off because of shrapnel and unwent
kaboom!shells, Channel One state television
... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
reported, "We were driving along and then there was an kaboom and the force of it blew out all the windows in the car," a bloodied casualty told Rossiya 24. A total of 48 people needed medical treatment and 11 were hospitalised, the regional Investigative Committee said.
There were no reports of deaths. Russian television showed victims with bandaged heads and limbs. An ambulance worker told Rossiya 24 that most of the injured were in cars, which had glass fly out of windows or even overturned. The emergency situations ministry used aircraft to drop water on the fire, which had spread to surrounding forests. The situation had stabilised on Wednesday, the ministry said, with kabooms ceasing around 6 am (0200 GMT), while fire continued to smoulder at the depot. Samara regional police said the kabooms began during work aimed at disposing of the old shells. However,
there's more than one way to skin a cat...
the emergency situations ministry said there had been "unsanctioned kabooms of munitions". Regional Sherlocks launched a criminal probe into a breach of safety regulations.