Blaze at school for the deaf kills 28 in Russia

Twenty-eight children were killed today in southern Russia when a fire roared through a boarding school for the deaf.

Firefighters pulled 138 people from the blazing building in Makhachkala, officials said. About 100 suffered burns and smoke poisoning, and 16 were in a serious condition.

The children who died were mostly six and seven-year-old boys. The rescue was slowed because each child could not hear the alarms and had to be woken individually.

Some were found cowering under furniture. And in the rush to get some to hospital they were thrown out of the windows of the two-storey building and caught by rescuers outside.

High winds also hindered fire crews’ efforts to extinguish the blaze.

Emergency officials said the flames, which broke out around 2am local time, may have been sparked by a short circuit that occurred when electricity was restored to the school after a blackout.

Television pictures showed smoke pouring through the barred windows of the yellow brick building hours after the fire started. The walls were charred and all the windows had shattered.

An Emergency Situations Ministry plane left Moscow for Makhachkala with medical supplies for the injured, said government spokeswoman Marina Ryklina. Makhachkala is in Dagestan, about 1,000 miles south of the capital.

It was the second deadly school fire in a week in Russia.

Twenty-two students aged 11 to 18 were killed on Monday in the remote village of Yakutia in northern Siberian. Ten were injured.

Officials blamed that blaze on violations of building codes, which the local Deputy Prosecutor Sergei Nemkov said also contributed to the high number of casualties.

He said the front door of the two-storey wooden building was closed because the staircase leading to it had crumbled, two other doors were blocked and a toilet had been built in a fire escape, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Fifty people a day – 18,000 a year – die in fires in Russia.

Most are caused by people smoking while drinking or general carelessness.

There are also inadequate fireproofing and alarm systems in many buildings.

The death toll from fires in Russia is four-and-a-half times greater than in the United States, which has twice the population.

The contrast is even starker with Britain, which sees 600 fire deaths each year, or one per 100,000 people – compared to 12.5 per 100,000 in Russia.

According to the newspaper Izvestia, 700 Russian school buildings were damaged by fires last year.