As many as 63 persons were killed in a fire at a nursing home in Russia at Kamyshevatskaya town on Tuesday. Thirty persons have been hospitalised. On Monday, a mine blast in Siberia’s Kemerovo region killed at least 104 miners. And on Saturday, seven people were killed when a Tu-134 aircraft with 57 on board crash-landed in Samara amid heavy fog. President Vladimir Putin today ordered Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to personally conduct probes into the three tragedies, which have killed a total of about 175 people.The fire started at 01.11 am local time in the two-storeyed building at Kamyshevatskaya in Krasnodar territory, when most of the inmates were asleep. According to the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, there were 97 people in the nursing home when the fire broke out. Many elderly patients are unable to move without help. The fire station was almost 50 km away and it took firefighters about an hour to reach the scene, said Natalya Lukash, a spokesperson of the Ministry’s press service. By this time, the first storey was already engulfed by fire. She added that the janitor had twice ignored the fire alarm, making an emergency call only when he saw flames. Only four nurses were on duty. “Medical staff were absent from their work places and the nurses could not find keys to unlock the emergency exit,” Lukash said. Head of the local department of the Emergency Situations Ministry Sergei Kudinov said repairs were on in the building. Work was to be completed in the last room, Kudinov said. “The fire started in a room, which was not equipped with a fire alarm system,” he said.
