On February, 27th there was an explosion followed by a subsequent collapse of an entire section of a 9-storey residential house number on Nikolai Ostrovsky Street in Astrakhan. Rescue workers are searching through the rubble for possible victims.
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These are a few videos of the collapse.
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First seconds after the collapse.
Location: Astrakhan
via maxik2k
Looks like poor construction of theses apartment blocks. If there was a earthquake, I wouldn’t wont to be near these buildings
Yeah, because earthquakes on geologically stable grounds are pretty common.
Looks like something that started the first Chechen war.
Second Chechen war – apartamemts bombings in 1999. Aaccording to later poisoned ex-KGB and ex-FSB agent Litvinenko, it was all planned and executed by FSB. Russian militsya even arrested two perpetrators while they’re planting explosives in another building, but it was soon revealed that they were FSB and practicing counter-terrorist tacticts. Yeah, right.
OMFG! It looks somebody stole the steel bars from the concrete panels.
Aw… I truly feel for the people who were there. And hope for quick recovery for injured. But the main point here is. How crappy is the quality of the building when just a simple gas explosion (they think) can cause collapsing of entire block? We had an explosion on 9 story building, where guy also killed himself. on 4th floor. He set of approx 500g of brisant explosives. House survived, no casualtyes beside himself. (It was in the middle of the night)
It’s not just this is a panel building that it happened but also the poople who lived there are also at fault, it’s not uncommon that some pople like to replan their living area by destoying the “unneeded” walls including the weight bearing walls. Also the buildings in our contries are not well maintained, if at all are. There are a lot of reasons this happened. I hope that the government will take care of those left without roof above their heads. And R.I.P. those who were less fortunate.
we have similar buildings here, and all walls are weight bearing walls – the whole building is extremely sturdy
frankly, i dont understand, how in earth coud any gas explosion took off that much wall sections
the last video… ehh RIP
Some experts say this could happen because of the metallo-plastic windows. Unlike the classic wooden window which would just beed blown out by the shock wave this one is in fact is as sturdy as the walls themself, therefore the presure was distributed on the walls and blew them off insted.
It really depends. There was also an explosion like this in Gdansk Wrzeszcz, Poland in 1995 where some sicko opened gas valve in 11 storey building basement. Two lowest storeys were completely destroyed, but all the rest survived. You can see here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM4l7HX6buU
demolition of that building later that day.
Still, there was another explosion in Lodz Retkinia, where the whole part of the 4 or 5 storey building collapsed.
In Estonia we have also had some explosions in Soviet era block buildings, but nothing as bad as in this video (though we don’t have pretty much same looking buildings, but the point stays the same). Last year one guy blew himself up during domestic fight, the officials later said that the explosion kicked down one weight-bearing wall, but the 9-storey house stood still…
From photos it was pretty unbelievable that it didn’t collapse.
I’ve also heard some stories that in Soviet Russia these houses were built by “Stroibatalions” (Military construction unit) who were famous for their nonexistent building quality- maybe this house was one of theirs?
there is a lot of vacant land….why build so tall?
Sounds like the Ronan Point disaster, in a shorter building. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronan_Point
In the Ronan Point disaster, a gas explosion blew out a load-bearing wall in a high rise apartment building. The building was build out of flat concrete panels that weren’t held together very well.
I hope all the people and animal companions in the collapse survived.
I would hate to be in charge of the legal investigation to determine who’s at fault for insurance compensation purposes. This could take years because J.Z. said earlier that some tenants may be partially responsible for taking out certain walls thus weakening the whole building.
The legal mess might dwarf the physical mess.