Fire and Silence: Children's Terror in Russia

From: New York Times - Apr 12, 2003

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

AKHACHKALA, Russia, April 12 -- Sadness and silence hung heavily in the halls of the Children's General Hospital in this southern Russian city the day after the fire. Small groups of worried parents stood in shadowy corners of the worn lobby waiting for news of their children, who were hanging on to life after a night of terror.

The blaze, in the early morning hours on Thursday, tore through a boarding school for the deaf here where 166 students were housed in a second-floor dormitory.

The most seriously hurt are on the sixth floor of the hospital. The emergency ward was quiet but for the metronomic beeping of the electrocardiogram machine tracing the heartbeat of Ibragim Ramazanov, 13. His thin, bare arms lay straight along his sides like a soldier at attention. A breathing machine was hooked to his small face.

"His lungs, his trachea are severely burned," said Zainulabid Abidov, the head doctor in the emergency ward. "We might be losing him."

Arsen Gasanov, who was recovering in another ward with the less severely injured children, was luckier. He was still sleeping when the flames roared into the second-floor room he shared with 14 other boys. They could not hear the shouts of their teachers below or even the sound of the fire. In the dark they ran, frantically looking for a way out. The smallest ones curled up under their beds, hoping to hide from the fire.

Arsen, from the safety of a hospital bed on Friday, gestured in rapid-fire motion to his mother, telling the story of how he had escaped. A slender 13-year-old, he was one of the older children in the school. He ran barefoot to the door, he indicated, but it was already in flames. In one dash he reached the window and shattered the glass with his foot. He crouched on the windowsill. The roofing above his head sputtered and popped. The mattresses had begun to burn.

Then came the fear, which he showed simply by opening his eyes wide. That was when he jumped, he explained to his mother, his thin arm making a long dive over his rumpled pajamas toward his toes.

"Try to imagine this -- deaf children and darkness," said Natalia Gasanova, Arsen's mother, who was sitting near his hospital bed in a blue dress, her hands folded in her lap. "It is impossible."

The scene of terror began just after 2 a.m. in the two-story yellow-brick building in this capital city of Dagestan, a republic in southern Russia. The warm, storm-speed wind of Wednesday night had whisked the fire quickly to the second floor from the gymnasium, where it apparently began as an electrical short. The authorities here tonight said the short may have been caused by several power outages earlier that windy evening that overloaded the building's 1970's-era wiring.

Arsen, whose name is common in the northern Caucasus region, showed the way for many in his room, but others in the school and orphanage were not so lucky. Those who made it to the first floor pounded on two blocked exit doors. The windows had bars on them. In the panic, few found the only available exit. In all, 28 children died, and 22 others are still in intensive care.

The first firefighter to arrive, Ruslan Dzhupanov, said he saw a hand knocking on a window in one of the girls' rooms. He extended a ladder to the room and firefighters began making their way through the smoke and pitch darkness with flashlights, looking for children.

"They were all making sounds of the deaf, their own kind of scream," he said. "We dragged them out from under beds, from behind their night tables. I saw one small child and motioned to him to come, but he just stood staring at me. When we got to the back rooms, we found the bodies. So many."

Water was another problem. Mr. Dzhupanov said the hydrant near the school was dry, a result of one of the city's chronic water shut-offs. He had to hook three long hoses together to reach the nearest working hydrant, which took three of his fire engines away from fighting the blaze.

Russians were stunned by the fire, which was the second such tragedy in a week. On Monday in a remote east Siberian village, 22 schoolchildren lost their lives as a blaze tore through their wooden schoolhouse. The fires dominated top-level meetings in the Russian government this week, with Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov calling them a "systematic problem" and ordering his cabinet to check school safety across the country.

Funerals were held Friday in towns across this mostly Muslim republic on the Caspian Sea. Deaf children from all over the region studied here.

Many of the parents learned of the fire on the morning television news. Arsen's mother, a part-time accountant at a fishery, saw film of the burning school on the 8 a.m. news. The family does not have a phone, so she made the five-hour drive from her small village to the capital, not knowing Arsen's fate.

By morning, the fire was out, but it would be hours before many parents would see their children. Another mother, Zaida Tagiro, said she spent most of the day on Thursday frantically searching the city morgue and hospitals, looking for her 13-year-old son, Davud. She found him in the emergency room of the Children's General Hospital.

Other women left the morgue, located just yards from the hospital, "in a state of shock," said Ms. Tagiro. The air was heavy with the smell of burning.

Arsen was born with hearing, his mother said, but lost it during a bout with meningitis and intensive doses of antibiotics when he was 2 years old. He is light on his feet, loves drawing and soccer. On Friday afternoon, he was using magic markers on paper to show his mother exactly where he had been sleeping, and his route to safety that others had then followed. His ward was a quiet whir of young children from the school, running down hallways and gesturing news of other students.

Mr. Abidov, who has worked in the hospital since 1987, said the hospital's equipment had been out of date for years because of a lack of money. All but one of the breathing machines are Soviet-made, from the 1960's. He said he had had hope that things would change after a bomb tore through a holiday parade in the nearby seaside town of Kaspiisk in May 2002 drawing national attention to the area and its poor medical facilities. But after the politicians and journalists left, the result was one new breathing machine.

On a warm morning today, teachers and neighbors stood picking through the rubble of the school, now a shell of peeling black walls and gaping windows. Sheets and blankets hung from the windows. The courtyard below was filled with children's belongings.

Erke Saiputdinova, an elderly teacher of the younger classes, brought some of her students' creations to set on the steps among the flowers. A shoe-box lid contained tiny clay figures -- a teacup, a carrot, a lopsided pear.

She held the school notebook of Gadzhi Medzhidov, 7, an orphan who died in the blaze. He was good at handstands and loved Dagestani folk dancing, she recalled. "How he danced," she said, crying softly. "you should have seen him dance."

Copyright 2003 © The New York Times Company