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The Bulgarian Government announced that a fund of 10 million leva was to be made available following a special Cabinet meeting on 12 December. The money would be distributed in two ways: 5 million leva would go to the Hitrino Municipality, and the other 5 million leva would go to the Labour and Social Policy Ministry. The Interior Ministry stated that people who had lost identity documents, passports and driving licences in the fire would have them replaced free of charge.
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Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}43°25′34″N 26°54′33″E / 43.4262°N 26.9093°E / 43.4262; 26.9093
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The Magude train disaster occurred on 27 March 1974 in Magude, Portuguese Mozambique, when a train carrying passengers from Rhodesia collided head-on with a Mozambican freight train, causing an explosion that killed 70 people and injured 200. At the time, it was the worst rail disaster in Mozambique's history.
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In the early morning or evening of 27 March 1974, a southbound train carrying passengers from Rhodesia crashed head-on with a stationary northbound Mozambican freight train that was holding, among other things, petroleum products. The crash occurred in Magude, Portuguese Mozambique, some miles north of the capital, Lourenço Marques . The collision caused the petroleum products aboard the freight train to explode and shower burning oil and several coaches of the passenger train. The extreme heat caused the affected cars to melt, killing the passengers inside. Several passengers from the coaches that were not burning attempted to save some of the victims, but were forced to turn back due to the flames.
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On the day of the collision, it was reported that 60 passengers were killed. Several days later, police reported 70 deaths and around 200 injuries. The event was believed to be the worst rail disaster in Mozambique's history, later surpassed by the Tenga rail disaster with 192 deaths. President William Tolbert of Liberia sent his condolences to Mozambican Prime Minister Joaquim Chissano.
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The Neishapur train disaster was a large explosion in the village of Khayyam near Nishapur in Iran, on 18 February 2004. Nearly 300 people were killed and the entire village destroyed when runaway train wagons crashed into the community in the middle of the night and exploded, resulting in Iran's deadliest rail disaster to ever occur. It is still unexplained how the parked train had come loose and was able to travel such a long distance with no driver or guard.
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The incident began in the city of Nishapur, where 51 railway wagons carrying sulfur, fertilizer, petrol and cotton wool broke loose from their siding at Abu Muslim Station, and rolled down the track for about twenty kilometers until they derailed and rolled down an embankment into the town of Khayyam. There was nobody manning the wagons, or onboard at the time of the crash. Local rescue services from neighboring towns arrived to rescue anybody who might have been trapped inside, and to extinguish several minor fires which had broken out in the wreckage.
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The substances in the wagons were all highly explosive or flammable , and had leaked following the crash. As the small fires spread, a large crowd of local people, including several local politicians and senior railway officials, gathered to watch the emergency operation.
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During the cleanup operation, the cargo of the wagons exploded - reportedly at the equivalent of 180 tons of TNT - demolishing Khayyam, badly damaging the nearby towns of Eyshabad, Dehnow and Taqiabad, and being felt in the city of Mashhad, 70 kilometers away. The entire village was destroyed, and all of the local emergency services and government personnel were killed or seriously injured in the blast. The wreckage of the train and village continued to burn and explode for several days, despite the cold weather.
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State authorities identified 295 confirmed killed and over 460 injured, including 182 rescue workers and state officials.
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Following the blast, troops from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were called in and were able to maintain security, whilst hundreds of rescue workers were brought in to help with the injured, the trapped, the missing and the dead. Four villages were later described as "totally destroyed".
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Initial reports that "earth tremors" started the wagons rolling have since been discredited, and a thorough investigation has so far failed to discover how exactly the wagons were able to travel from Nishapur to Khayyam on their own, why so many highly flammable cargoes were stored and transported together, and why the details of the crash weren't discovered sooner, perhaps in time to arrange an evacuation. A statement from the Iranian Transport Minister Ahmad Khorram shortly after the incident reported that natural causes could not have caused the disaster, and that an investigation was underway to determine whether it was incompetence or malice by railway staff that allowed the wagons to come loose from where they were parked.
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The Ufa train disaster was a railway accident that occurred on 4 June 1989, in Iglinsky District, Bashkir ASSR, Soviet Union, when an explosion killed 575 people and injured 800 more. It is the deadliest rail disaster during peacetime in Soviet/Russian history.
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The accident was named after Ufa, the largest city in the Bashkir ASSR, although it occurred about 75 kilometres east of the city. An annual commemoration is usually held at the Ulu-Telyak station , near the disaster site; there is a memorial at the site.
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The pipeline had originally been designed for the transportation of oil but had been reformatted to transport natural gas liquids for the Soviet petrochemical industry. In May 1984 the Soviet Ministry of Petroleum had canceled the installation of an automatic real time leak detection system. In 1985 an excavator caused severe mechanical damage to the pipe in the form of a 1.7 m crack during bypass construction. Additionally on the night of the explosion there was increased pressure in the system due to increased demand.
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At 1:15 am, two passenger trains of the Kuybyshev Railway carrying approximately 1,300 vacationers to and from Novosibirsk and a resort in Adler on the Black Sea exploded, 11 kilometres from the town of Asha, Chelyabinsk Oblast. Without anyone knowing, a faulty gas pipeline 900 metres from the line had leaked natural gas liquids , and weather conditions allowed the gas to accumulate across the lowlands, creating a flammable cloud along part of the Kuybyshev Railway.
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The explosion occurred after wheel sparks from the two passenger trains heading in opposite directions ignited this flammable cloud. Estimates of the size of the explosion have ranged from 250–300 tons TNT equivalent to up to 10 kilotons TNT equivalent.
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Military units and medical teams were dispatched to the scene of the accident, many of whom searched the surrounding woods and mountains in case victims managed to escape from the scene of the accident. Scenes of the accident were streamed on Soviet television channels, with images of both the accident and victims being shown. Victims were initially evacuated to nearby towns for basic first aid, before they were evacuated by medical vehicles and helicopters to Ufa and Techelyabinsk or flown via Aeroflot to Moscow for the most severely injured. The total evacuation took 16 hours and 45 minutes with 806 people admitted to hospitals and burn centers.
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Many of the victims died later in hospital; official figures are 575 dead and over 800 injured, but an unofficial estimate of the number of deaths is approximately 780. 181 of the dead were children.
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Many survivors received severe thermal burns and brain injuries. Of the reported 469 survivors, 109 were children with a majority of them hospitalized. A seventeen member burn team flew from San Antonio, Texas to Ufa to help assist in the care and management of about 150 burn patients. The group returned to Moscow for evaluation and treatment of about 25 children seven months after the disaster, with hepatitis, cardiomyopathy and severe emotional disorders all seen in the children. A 16 person team from the UK went to Chelyabinsk to assist there.
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On the afternoon of 4 June, Mikhail Gorbachev, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and members of the government commission to investigate the accident visited the site. Rumors of sabotage were widespread in the local population, but a majority of officials believed the disaster was accidental. The Chairman of the Commission for Investigation of the accident was Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Gennady Vedernikov. The trial over the accident continued for six years, nine officials being charged, mostly members of Nefteprovodmontazh including the chief of the construction and installation department of Nefteprovodmontazh and foremen. The charges were brought under Article 215, part II of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, where the maximum penalty was five years imprisonment.
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According to Dmitry Chernov and Didier Sornette, the following factors contributed to the disaster:
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Another factor, aside from the gas leak's factor set, was reported to be the failure to respond to multiple reports of the presence of gas in the air prior to the explosion.
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Gennady Verzyan, a local resident in Asha :
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"Between one and two in the morning I saw a bright light shooting upwards on the other side of the border with Bashkiria. A pillar of fire rose up hundreds of metres into the sky, and after that the shock wave hit. The wave was so powerful that it blew the glass out of the windows of some of the houses."
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Alexei Godok, who in 1989 was the first deputy head of passenger services on the South Urals Railway:
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"When we flew over the scene of the accident it looked as though it had been hit with some kind of napalm. All that was left of the trees were blackened stakes, as if they had been stripped bare from root to tip. The carriages had been thrown all over the place... By unhappy accident the train from Novosibirsk was running 7 minutes late. If it had been on time, if they had met at a different spot, nothing would have happened. The tragedy is that when they met, the brakes of one of the trains produced a spark, and when that met the gas that had built up in the low-lying area the explosion occurred instantaneously. It’s just fate. And neglectfulness too on our part, of course... I spent some time at the scene with the KGB and the military looking into what had caused the disaster. By the end of the day, 5 June, we already knew that this was a terrible accident rather than sabotage or anything like that... People living in villages nearby had actually smelled gas previously, our train drivers had too... An inspection showed that the gas had been building up there for between 20 and 25 days. With trains passing by the whole time! As for the gas pipeline, it emerged that it was not being monitored at all, even though the relevant authorities were required to inspect the condition of their pipelines regularly. After this disaster a new instruction was introduced for all our drivers - if they smell gas they are required to report it immediately and all trains are to be stopped until an inspection can be carried out. This was a lesson we learned at a terrible cost..."
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Salavat Abdulin, whose daughter Lena Abdulina died in the accident and who became co-chairman of the Association of Relatives of the Victims of the Accident near Asha:
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"We were told at the rail station that our children had been in the rear carriages and that these had not been affected. Someone was saying they had received a call from their teacher Mr Tulupov, who had been travelling with them, and he had said that everything was OK. But they were just telling us that to keep us calm. At six in the evening we got on a special train to Asha, then from Asha to Ufa. My daughter’s name wasn’t on the list of survivors. We spent three days going round the hospitals looking for her. But we found nothing. Then after that my wife and I went round the cold storage facilities... There was one girl there. She was about the same age as my daughter. She was missing her head, all that was left were two bottom teeth poking out. She was as black as a cooking pot. I thought I’d be able to recognise her by her legs, she used to dance, she was a ballerina, but the legs were gone too, it was just a torso. But the torso looked like hers. I blamed myself afterward, because it might have been possible to identify her by her blood type or by her collarbone, which she had broken as a child... But in the state I was in, it just didn’t occur to me. Maybe that was her... There were a lot of ‘fragments’ of bodies that were left unidentified. 24 people from our school were never found at all, 21 were confirmed as killed. 9 survived. None of the teachers were ever found."
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Valery Mikheev, deputy editor of the ‘Steel Spark’ newspaper, Asha:
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"Just after going to bed I was woken up by a horribly bright flash. I saw a glow on the horizon. About thirty seconds later the shock wave reached Asha and smashed a lot of windows.. I realised that something terrible had happened. A few minutes later I was already at the town police station with a number of others who had turned out to do our bit, and we rushed toward the glow. The scene that we found there was something beyond even the sickest imagination. The trees were burning up like giant candles, and the cherry red carriages were smoking all along the embankment. The unreal sound of hundreds of dying and burning people’s cries of pain and terror all merged into one. The forest was burning, the tracks were burning, the people were burning. We rushed after the people who were running around on fire, beat out the flames and led them closer to the road and away from the flames. It was like the apocalypse… And so many of them were children! The medics started to arrive shortly after us. We put the living on one side and the dead on the other. I remember carrying a little girl and she kept asking me where her mother was. I handed her over to a doctor I knew, and I was saying - come on, get her wounds dressed! He said to me: "Valery, she’s gone..." - "What do you mean she’s gone, she was just talking?!" - “She was in shock”."
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The next day was declared a national day of mourning with flags lowered and entertainment programs cancelled. A planned resumption of the National Congress of People's Deputies was also cancelled.
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The Mississauga train derailment of 1979, also known as the Mississauga Miracle occurred on Saturday, November 10, 1979, in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, when a 106-car CP Rail freight train from Windsor, Ontario derailed near the intersection of Mavis Road and Dundas Street in Mississauga, Ontario. As a result of the derailment, more than 200,000 people were evacuated in what was the largest peacetime evacuation in North America until the New Orleans evacuations during Hurricane Katrina. There were no deaths resulting from the incident. This was the last major explosion in the Greater Toronto Area until the Sunrise Propane blast in 2008.
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A CP Rail freight train, led by three EMD F40PH diesel locomotives loaned from GO Transit, was eastbound from Windsor, Ontario. The train consisted of 106 cars that carried multiple chemicals and explosives, including styrene, toluene, propane, caustic soda, and chlorine. On the 33rd car, heat began to build up in an improperly-lubricated journal bearing on one of the wheels, one of the few still in use at that time as most had long since been replaced with roller bearings, resulting in the condition known among train workers as a "hot box". Residents living beside the tracks reported smoke and sparks coming from the car, and those who were close to Mississauga thought the train was on fire. The friction eventually burned through the axle and bearing, and as the train was passing the Mavis Road level crossing, a wheelset fell off completely.
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At 11:53 p.m., at the Mavis Road crossing, the damaged bogie left the track, causing the remaining parts of the train to derail. The impact caused several tank cars filled with propane to burst into flames.
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The derailment also ruptured several other tankers, spilling styrene, toluene, propane, caustic soda, and chlorine onto the tracks and into the air. A huge explosion resulted, sending a fireball 1,500 m into the sky which could be seen from 100 km away. As the flames were erupting, the train's brakeman, Larry Krupa, 27, at the suggestion of the engineer , managed to close an air brake angle spigot at the west end of the undamaged 32nd car, allowing the engineer to release the air brakes between the locomotives and the derailed cars and move the front part of the train eastward along the tracks, away from danger. This prevented those cars from becoming involved in the fire, important as many of them also contained dangerous goods. Krupa was later recommended for the Order of Canada for his bravery, which a later writer has described as "bordering on lunacy."
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After more explosions, firefighters concentrated on cooling cars, allowing the fire to burn itself out, but a ruptured chlorine tank became a cause for concern. With the possibility of a deadly cloud of chlorine gas spreading through suburban Mississauga, more than 200,000 people were evacuated. A number of residents allowed evacuees to stay with them until the crisis abated. Some of these people were later moved again as their hosts were also evacuated. The evacuation was managed by various officials including the mayor of Mississauga, Hazel McCallion, the Peel Regional Police and other governmental authorities. McCallion sprained her ankle early during the crisis, but continued to hobble to press conferences.
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Within a few days Mississauga was practically deserted, until the contamination had been cleared, the danger neutralized and residents were allowed to return to their homes. The city was finally reopened on the evening of November 16. The chlorine tank was emptied on November 19.
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It was the largest peacetime evacuation in North American history until the evacuation of New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and remained the second-largest until Hurricane Irma in 2017.
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Due to the speed and efficiency with which it was conducted, many cities later studied and modelled their own emergency plans after Mississauga's.
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As a result of the accident, rail regulators in both the U.S. and Canada required that any line used to carry hazardous materials into or through a populated area have hotbox detectors.
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Larry Krupa was inducted into the North America Railway Hall of Fame for his contribution to the railway industry. He was recognized in the "National" division of the "Railway Workers & Builders" category.
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The city of Mississauga sued CP in hopes of holding the railroad responsible for the massive emergency services bill. However, the city dropped its suit after CP dropped its longstanding opposition to passenger service on its trackage near Mississauga. This cleared the way for GO Transit to open the Milton line two years later.
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Hazel McCallion, in her first term as mayor at the time of the accident, was continuously re-elected until her retirement in 2014 at age 93.
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The song Trainwreck 1979 by Canadian band Death From Above 1979 is about the derailment:
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It ran off the track, 11-79
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While the immigrants slept, there wasn't much time
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The mayor came calling and got 'em outta bed
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They packed up their families and headed upwind
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A poison cloud, a flaming sky, 200,000 people and no one died
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And all before the pocket dial, yeah!
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The Canoe River train crash occurred on November 21, 1950, near Valemount in eastern British Columbia, Canada, when a westbound troop train and the eastbound Canadian National Railway Continental Limited collided head-on. The collision killed 21 people: 17 Canadian soldiers en route to the Korean War and the two-man locomotive crew of each train.
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The post-crash investigation found that the order given to the troop train differed from the intended message. Crucial words were missing, causing the troop train to proceed on its way rather than halt on a siding, resulting in the collision. A telegraph operator, Alfred John "Jack" Atherton, was charged with manslaughter; the Crown alleged that he was negligent in passing an incomplete message. His family hired his Member of Parliament, John Diefenbaker, as defence counsel. Diefenbaker joined the British Columbia bar to take the case, and obtained Atherton's acquittal.
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