It took firemen almost 15 hours to put down a gas pipeline fire in southwestern Moscow. The blaze was suppressed at 3:45 p.m. local time, a source at the Moscow department of the Emergency Situations Ministry told Itar-Tass. That was the biggest fire in the post-WW2 history of the capital city, the source said. The pipeline caught fire on Ozyornaya Street, close to the Moscow Circular Road, at about 00:20 a.m. local time. Eyewitnesses said they heard gas roaring like a jetliner and saw a burning torch high as a 20-story house within seconds. “There must have been a pipeline crack caused by various technical reasons,” experts said. Moscow authorities immediately assured local residents that nothing endangered their homes. Yet the fire spread onto a five-story administrative building. Rescuers started their work with keeping the blaze off a gasoline station, located 500 meters away from the pipeline. The fire was contained at about 6:00 a.m. “We have information about five victims. Their skin is burned at 10 to 25%,” Deputy Emergency Situations Minister Alexander Chupriyan said. “All of them are drivers, who happened to pass by the pipeline at the moment the fire broke out.” Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and the city police said that the fire was a man-made disaster. The damaged pipeline had been supplying gas to several heating plants, which had to switch to reserve power sources when the accident happened. “The gas pipeline fire is being investigated. A criminal case may be opened on the investigation results,” head of the Moscow department of the Prosecutor General's Office Investigation Committee Anatoly Bagmet told Itar-Tass. He confirmed the man-made cause of the accident. The pipeline fire damaged over 80 vehicles, including twelve that burned down flat, spokesman for the Moscow department of the Emergency Situations Ministry Yevgeny Bobylev told Itar-Tass. “A total of 129 vehicles were evacuated from the fire zone. Twelve burned down, and about 70 were damaged,” he said. The fire damaged a telephone cable and cut telephone service to 100,000 residents of Moscow's Solntsevo and Peredelkino neighborhoods and the suburban areas of Domodedovo and Vnukovo. “This is not a terrorist act but a man-made disaster at 99.9%,” Bobylev said.
