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Fierce wildfires raging across Russia are a risk to the top-secret capital of its nuclear research industry, officials admitted last night.

Two soldiers were killed yesterday fighting blazes dangerously close to the highly sensitive town of Sarov, despite claims in recent days the fires were under control.

The town, where the atomic complexes are based, is so tightly guarded it remains closed to foreigners, as in Soviet times.

Hundreds of wildfires have been burning across three time zones in Russia. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin yesterday boarded a fire-fighting plane to dump water on blazes close to Moscow, where the smoke has caused thick smog.

At Sarov, 230 miles east of the capital and known during the Cold War as Arzamas-16, soldiers have dug a five-mile canal to protect the nuclear arms site.

The two who died were tackling blazes in forests surrounding the town, which remains ringed
by high fences and military checkpoints.

One, rifle battalion commander Vasily Tezetev, 22, ‘died the death of a hero’, according to the local emergency centre. Officials say some sensitive nuclear equipment has been removed from the site to be stored away from the fires.

An official for Russian nuclear body Rosatom insisted last night the nuclear facilities were ‘working normally’ but admitted there were four sites close to Sarov ‘where the risk of sudden inflammation
is still high’.

Conflicting reports over the threat have raised fears that officials are covering up the extent of the damage.

Built by Nazi prisoners of war, the first Soviet nuclear bomb was created in the town and it remains the headquarters of Russian atomic research.

Fires also threaten Snezhinsk, home to another of Russia’s top nuclear research centres, and the reprocessing plant Ozersk, also in the Urals, where a state of emergency has been declared.

Around 557 blazes are still raging, with forecasters fearing the extremely dry conditions could last another ten days.

Moscow remains covered by a stifling smog, with morgues full from a huge rise in the numbers dying during the heat wave.

The cost already to the Russian economy already amounts to a staggering £10 billion and experts have warned the damage will stall Russia’s recovery from recession.

‘Economic growth in Russia is slowing and the heat wave will lead to a further slowdown,’ said Alexander Morozov, chief economist for HSBC bank in Russia.

Source

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Hundreds of rescuers scrambled Tuesday to try to locate more than 60 workers trapped in a Siberian hydroelectric plant after an accident on Monday. But with only two survivors recovered, the acting chief executive of RusHydro, which owns the plant, said that most had probably drowned.

At least 12 people were confirmed dead after the bursting of a water conduit that leads to the turbines at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant in the Khakassia region of Siberia, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry. As many as 64 workers from the plant, Russia’s largest power generator, were still missing as of Tuesday morning, the ministry said.

“Finding survivors in the flood zone is not likely, but we are searching,” the executive, Vitaly Zubakin, said, according to the Ria Novosti news agency. A former director at the plant, Alexander Toloshinov, told the Interfax news agency that workers could only survive if they managed to stay out of the frigid water.

Vesti television of Russia showed what it said was cellphone video showing plumes of water spewing from the plant and several loud explosions in the first few minutes after the accident.

“There was a large explosion, and the power went out,” said Irina Perepelitsina, a worker at the plant interviewed by NTV television. “The alarm went off, and we all ran to the exits.”

Sergei Shoigu, the emergency situations minister, suggested that a hydraulic pressure surge could have caused water to burst through the walls and ceiling in the engine room of Turbine No. 2, causing it to rapidly fill with water, a statement on the ministry’s Web site said. Investigators from the Prosecutor General’s Office earlier said the accident could have occurred when a transformer exploded during repairs.

Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s general’s investigative wing, said Tuesday that prosecutors were not considering a terrorist attack or sabotage as possibilities.

Meanwhile, the environmental toll continued to grow. The damaged plant has released a vast oil slick on the Yenisei River, the Natural Resources Ministry said. Power was lost to five major factories, which will now be supplied by burning coal, company officials said. Restoring the plant could take years.

Dozens Presumed Drowned at Siberian Plant

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More than a day after a freight train derailed and exploded on the Italian coast, officials raised the death toll to 17, including two small children and an unidentified man who subsequently died of severe burns, news agencies reported.

The 14-car train carrying liquefied petroleum gas derailed in Viareggio around midnight on Monday, engulfing a neighborhood in flames. More than 34 people injured, 12 of them in serious condition.

The train was traveling south through coastal Tuscany when the axle on the first car broke, officials said. The train ran off the tracks and exploded.

“We saw a ball of fire rising up to the sky,” one witness, Gianfranco Bini, told The Associated Press. Mr. Bini lives in a building overlooking the station. “We heard three big rumbles, like bombs. It looked like war had broken out.”

The flames ravaged entire streets, and five buildings collapsed, killing some residents as they slept.

“It was an apocalypse,” a survivor said on Italian television, according to Reuters. “All we could smell was gas and things burning, and all we could see was flames.”

Three children were pulled alive from the rubble, the Italian news media reported.

More than 1,000 people were evacuated, and about 100 were left homeless, the mayor of Viareggio, Luca Lunardini, told news agencies.

Accusations of poor infrastructure and questions about why dangerous materials were being shipped through residential areas immediately added to the political pressures on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He was met with boos and cries of “go home” when he arrived in Viareggio on Tuesday afternoon.

At a news conference, Mr. Berlusconi said that the government would soon call a state of emergency, and that it would also “guarantee the reconstruction of 100 percent of the houses destroyed,” Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.

The accident comes a week before the country is expected to host world leaders for the Group of 8 summit meeting, to be held in another disaster zone, L’Aquila. An earthquake there on April 6 killed nearly 300 people and left 65,000 homeless.

Guido Bertolaso, Italy’s senior civil protection official, called the episode one of the “worst tragedies” to occur in the Italian train system, ANSA reported. In 2005, 17 people died in a collision between a passenger and freight train.

Raffaele Gargiulo, a police spokesman for the nearby city of Lucca, told The A.P. that the bodies of the dead were so badly burned that identifications would be difficult.

The regional spokesman for a railway union told ANSA that Tuesday’s accident was the fifth train-related accident in Tuscany this month. Several other trains either derailed or went off their tracks, though there were no reported fatalities or injuries.

Railway unions called for a one-hour halt in train traffic for Wednesday, Reuters reported, out of respect for the dead and to draw attention to the need for higher safety standards.

Death Toll Rises to 17 in Italy Train Derailment

Continue reading »]]> More than 200 people are believed dead after an Air France passenger jet disappeared over the Atlantic on a flight from Brazil.

Officials said they had “no hope” for Air France Flight 447 which dropped off the radar three hours and less than 200 miles into a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

As the Brazilian air force mounted a search and rescue operation for the Airbus 330-200k in the waters around the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, families of passengers gathered at a crisis centre in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport awaiting news.

The Foreign Office said it was “urgently” seeking news on whether there were any Britons on board.

Air France said that the aircraft had sent a message reporting an electrical “short circuit” after strong turbulence.

The company said the plane had probably been struck by lightning.

An Airbus source described the failure as “catastrophic” suggesting a sudden and unexplained systems failure.

The flight left Rio at 7pm local time (11pm British time) and was due in Paris at 11.15am (10.15am BST).

It was 190 miles north east of the coastal Brazilian city of Natal when it was lost contact three hours and 20 minutes later.

Authorities began the operation around Fernando de Noronha, an idyllic holiday destination but they cautioned that the search area could be three times the size of Europe.

Air France said that it “shares the emotion and worry of the families concerned.”

A source at the airline told Le Monde: “The plane disappeared from the screens several hours ago.

“It could be a transponder problem, but this kind of fault is very rare and the plane did not land when expected.”

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said he had been informed of the crisis and ordered all relevant government agencies to hunt “for any sign of the plane”.

The country’s transport minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said there was “real pessimism at this hour”.

“We can fear the worst,” he said.

Media in Italy reported that five Italian nationals were among the 216 passengers and 12 crew on board.

Brazil’s air traffic control system has been in crisis since 2006, when a Gol passenger jet collided with a private plane above the Amazon killing all 154 people on board.

That disaster was followed just 10 months later by the worst crash in Brazil’s history when a TAM jet slid off the runway at São Paulo’s city airport and crashed into a warehouse. Some 199 people died.

Although the two crashes were not directly related, Brazil’s air traffic control system and oversight of it were implicated in both. The Gol crash caused nationwide turmoil after air traffic controllers launched strikes and go slows at what they said were poor working conditions.

The system is run by the military but questions were raised about the capacity, training and above all, the English language abilities, of the controllers.

The Gol crash reflected “systematic shortcomings in emphasis on positive air traffic control concepts,” the US’s National Transportation Safety Board said in its final report on the disaster.

Air France plane lost: officials say ‘no hope’ of finding airliner

Continue reading »]]> The death toll from the Abruzzo earthquake reached 228 last night as a series of strong aftershocks continued to rattle through the region.

A tremor of 5.6 magnitude spread more panic yesterday evening in L’Aquila, a city once home to about 70,000 people, where the impact was felt the strongest. At least one person was reported killed as a result of the shock. Monday’s earthquake was between 5.8 to 6.3 magnitude.

All day, aftershocks hampered the rescue effort as relatives of the missing waited for news of their loved ones.

At one point rescuers looking for more bodies in a collapsed student dormitory in L’Aquila had to run from the rubble as one of the bigger aftershocks hit shortly before midday.

Ollie Hodge, 29, a rugby player from Bristol, who signed up to play for L’Aquila last year, told of his horror as he woke up in the middle of the earthquake, which also killed a teammate.

“Myself and a few of the boys from the club went out to the hospital to help. We were carrying beds down the stairs and carrying people out. You just do what you can in a situation like that. It still hasn’t sunk in yet. The scenes in the centre of town were unreal — it’s like a war zone down there. Absolutely horrendous.”

By yesterday afternoon rescue workers had all but given up hope of pulling any more survivors from the wreckage, and the men in hard hats and harnesses were looking for corpses rather than miracles.

The quake had ripped the student dormitory in two, leaving an ugly crevasse of twisted metal and crumpled air vents. In the afternoon four people were finally located but tearful emergency workers declined to say whether they were alive or dead.

In some areas of the city, rescuers were digging by hand to find any survivors. Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, said that the efforts would continue for two more days “until it is certain that there is no one else alive”.

Tent camps provided by civil protection volunteers housed some of the 17,000 left homeless by the quake, but many spent the night in the chill mountain air without blankets.

David de Angeli stood outside one of the tents, cradling a bandaged hand. He described how he had escaped from his house as the wreckage rained down, scooping up a neighbour’s ten-year-old daughter and fleeing into the street. “I still haven’t heard from my son or my grandson,” he said, bursting into tears and walking away.

Aerial footage showed the scale of the destruction in this city of Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque and Renaissance architectural treasures. Roofs were missing from modern buildings, old churches had fallen and the walls and other parts of medieval buildings had tumbled to the ground. Officials said that 10,000 to 15,000 buildings were either damaged or destroyed.

Earthquake experts and the Italian media praised the rescue effort and said that the Government had responded well to the catastrophe. But, they said, the real disaster was the country’s continuing failure to take measures to limit earthquake damage and prevent deaths.

“This time the State was there for us,” said La Stampa. It added: “It is unpleasant to reflect on a catastrophe when there are still people to pull out of the rubble, but we have to do so if we are to avoid yet more pain and rage. It is not earthquakes which kill, but badly constructed buildings.”

Franco Barberi, a geologist, said in a television broadcast from a camp for evacuees at L’Aquila that “an earthquake like this in California would not have provoked a single death”.

Scale of the disaster

• 228 confirmed dead
• 17 bodies still unidentified
• 15 missing
• 50,000 estimated homeless
• 13,000 estimated number of buildings damaged or destroyed

Italian earthquake: deathtoll reaches 228 as aftershock slows rescue

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A powerful earthquake in mountainous central Italy knocked down whole blocks of buildings early Monday as residents slept, killing more than 150 people in the country’s deadliest quake in nearly three decades. Tens of thousands were homeless and 1,500 were injured.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi, speaking by telephone with one of the TV networks of his media empire, said more than 150 people were dead and more than 1,500 people injured in the quake, which struck near the medieval town of L’Aquila, nestled in the Apennine mountains, before dawn.

The quake felled whole blocks of buildings in L’Aquila and the surrounding area early Monday as residents slept.

Ambulances screamed through L’Aquila as firefighters with dogs and a crane worked feverishly to reach people trapped in fallen buildings, including a university dormitory where a half dozen students were believed still inside.

As midnight approached, rescuers pulled a scared-looking dog with a bleeding paw out of the dormitory rubble. Relatives and friends of the missing stood wrapped in blankets or huddled under umbrellas in the rain as rescuers pulled out pieces of what seemed like an armoire, a smashed chair, photographs, wallets and diaries but none of the young people for whom they were searching.

The relatives, sobbing or grim-faced, refused to talk to reporters.

But elsewhere in L’Aquila, firefighters reported pulling a 21-year-old woman and a 22-year-man, both of them Italian, from what was an apartment building where many students rented flats. The building’s five stories had pancaked into one slab or concrete.

Outside the half-collapsed building, part of the University of L’Aquila, tearful young people huddled together, some in their slippers, after being roused from sleep by the quake. Dozens managed to escape as the dorm walls fell around them but hours after the quake, a body of a male student was pulled from the rubble.

“We managed to come down with other students but we had to sneak through a hole in the stairs as the whole floor came down,” said student Luigi Alfonsi, 22. “I was in bed — it was like it would never end as I heard pieces of the building collapse around me.”

“There was water gushing out of broken water pipes, and the corridor which led to the stairs was partially blocked when a piece of the wall came down,” Alfonsi, his eyes filling with tears and his hands trembling, told The Associated Press.

Some 10,000 to 15,000 buildings were either damaged or destroyed, officials said. L’Aquila Mayor Massimo Cialente said about 100,000 people were homeless. It was not clear if the mayor’s estimate included surrounding towns.

The quake also took a severe toll on the city’s prized architectural heritage. L’Aquila was built as a mountain stronghold during the Middle Ages and has many Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance buildings.

Damage to monuments was reported as far away as Rome, where cracks appeared at the thermal baths built in the 3rd century by the emperor Caracalla, Culture Ministry official Giuseppe Proietti said. The damage was not serious, and other Roman monuments suffered no consequences, he said.

Parts of many of the ancient churches and castles in and around L’Aquila have collapsed. Centuries-old churches in many isolated villages in the area are believed partly collapsed, and damage to ancient monuments has been reported as far as Rome.

L’Aquila, capital of the Abruzzo region, was near the epicenter about 70 miles (110 kilometers) northeast of Rome. It is a quake-prone region that has had at least nine smaller jolts since the beginning of April. The quake struck at 3:32 a.m. The U.S. Geological Survey said the big quake was magnitude 6.3, but Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics put it at 5.8. More than a dozen aftershocks followed.

Italy’s national police chief Antonio Manganelli said several people had been arrested for looting. He said those picked up were “caught while they were stealing from abandoned houses. It’s sad.”

The quake hit 26 towns and cities around L’Aquila, which lies in a valley surrounded by the Apennine mountains. Castelnuovo, a hamlet of about 300 people 15 miles (25 kilometers) southeast of L’Aquila, appeared hard hit, and five people were confirmed dead there. Another small town, Onno, was almost leveled.

“A few houses have remained standing, but just a few,” Stefania Pezzopane, provincial president of L’Aquila, told Corriere della Sera. Rescue workers in Onna, a different small town, with a population of about 250, said the town was virtually deserted as survivors sought shelter elsewhere.

The four-star, 133-room Hotel Duca degli Abruzzi in L’Aquila’s historic center was heavily damaged but still standing and it was not known if there were any casualties, said Ornella De Luca of the national civil protection agency in Rome. “The information is very fragmentary,” she said.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi declared a state of emergency, freeing up federal funds to deal with the disaster, and canceled a visit to Russia so he could deal with the crisis.

Condolences poured in from around the world, including from President Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI and Abdullah Gul, president of quake-prone Turkey.

Slabs of walls, twisted steel supports, furniture and wire fences were strewn about the streets of L’Aquila, and gray dust carpeted sidewalks, cars and residents.

Residents and rescue workers hauled away debris from collapsed buildings by hand or in an assembly lines, passing buckets. Firefighters pulled a woman covered in dust from the debris of her four-story home. Rescue crews demanded quiet as they listened for signs of life from other people believed still trapped inside.

Elsewhere, a man dressed only in his underwear wept as he was pulled from the debris and embraced.

A body lay on the sidewalk, covered by a white sheet.

Parts of L’Aquila’s main hospital were evacuated because they were at risk of collapse, and only two operating rooms were in use. Bloodied victims waited in hospital hallways or in the courtyard and many were being treated in the open. A field hospital was being set up.

In the dusty streets, as aftershocks rumbled through, residents hugged one another, prayed quietly or frantically tried to call relatives. Residents covered in dust pushed carts full of clothes and blankets that they had thrown together before fleeing their homes.

“We left as soon as we felt the first tremors,” said Antonio D’Ostilio, 22, as he stood on a street in L’Aquila with a huge suitcase piled with clothes. “We woke up all of a sudden and we immediately ran downstairs in our pajamas.”

Evacuees converged on an athletics field on the outskirts of L’Aquila where a makeshift tent camp was being set up. Civil protection officials distributed bread and water to people who lay on the grass next to heaps of their belongings.

“It’s a catastrophe and an immense shock,” said resident Renato Di Stefano, who was moving with his family to the camp as a precaution. “It’s struck in the heart of the city, we will never forget the pain.”

The Culture Ministry said a wall of the 13th century Santa Maria di Collemaggio church collapsed and the bell tower of the Renaissance San Bernadino church also fell. The 16th century castle housing the Abruzzo National Museum was damaged.

This was Italy’s deadliest quake since Nov. 23, 1980, when one measuring 6.9-magnitude hit southern regions, leveling villages and causing some 3,000 deaths.

Many modern structures in Italy over recent decades have failed to hold up to the rigors of quakes along Italy’s mountainous spine, or in coastal cities like Naples. Despite warnings by geologists and architects, some of these buildings have not been retrofitted for seismic safety.

Pezzopane, the provincial president, said residents may have been lulled into complacency because so many smaller quakes had jolted the area, including two or three earlier in the night.

“Considering what happened, a bit more concern, more attention might have saved lives,” she said.

National officials insisted no quake can ever be predicted and that no evacuation could have been ordered on the basis of the recent jolts.

“There is no possibility of making any predictions on earthquakes. This is a fact in the world’s scientific community,” Civil protection chief Guido Bertolaso told reporters.

The last major quake to hit central Italy was a 5.4-magnitude temblor that struck the south-central Molise region on Oct. 31, 2002, killing 28 people, including 27 children who died when their school collapsed.

Over 150 dead, 1,500 injured in Italy quake

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Rescue workers are searching for up to four people still missing after a building housing archives collapsed on Tuesday in the German city of Cologne.

Witnesses said there may have been two people inside a car parked outside the archive and another two in a nearby building that subsequently collapsed.

The area must be stabilised before rescue teams can move into the rubble.

Cracks and groaning noises had alerted staff and visitors at the archive, all of whom escaped before it collapsed.

Work was being carried out nearby on a new underground railway, but the company involved said there had been no recent tunnelling.

‘Spreading cracks’

Gregor Timmer, a spokesman for the city of Cologne, said on Wednesday morning that rescue workers had to assume that between two and four people were still missing underneath the rubble of the archive and two neighbouring buildings.

“There are reports on two inhabitants of the building next to the archive that collapsed and two people who were inside a car in front of the building at the time of the tragedy,” he told the Reuters news agency.

Up to nine people were initially reported missing after the collapse, but several have since contacted city officials, police said.

The archive building dated from the 1970s and contained 65,000 original documents, some of them dating back more than 1,000 years.

There has been no word on the condition of the collection, which includes manuscripts by Communist philosophers Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels and items left to the city by figures such as the Nobel Prize-winning author, Heinrich Boell.

Mr Timmer said rescuers needed to stabilise the remains of the structures before moving into the rubble to determine whether anyone was trapped inside.

“The buildings to the left and right of the collapse site are severely damaged and are in danger of partly falling down. That is why rescuers are currently unable to step onto the rubble,” he added.

On Tuesday evening, concrete was pumped into the ground to firm it up. Two hundred rescue workers are still at the scene.

The six-storey building collapsed at about 1400 local time (1300 GMT), bringing down two other neighbouring buildings.

One witness said the scene resembled a Hollywood movie as cracks slowly spread up the building’s facade before it collapsed in a cloud of dust.

It is not yet clear what caused the buildings to collapse, officials said.

Authorities in Cologne have evacuated buildings within a 150m radius around the site, including two schools and a retirement home.

German archive building collapses

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A Turkish airliner carrying 134 people crashed at Amsterdam’s main airport Wednesday, killing nine people and injuring more than 50 others.

The airliner crashed into a muddy field just short of Amsterdam main airport mid-morning local time, breaking into three pieces. The Boeing 737 aircraft had been en route from Istanbul to The Netherlands and was trying to land in misty weather. The Turkish airline initially said there had been no casualties, but Dutch authorities quickly amended that claim.

The Turkish Transport Minister said it was a miracle there weren’t more casualties.

At a news conference, a local mayor, Michel Bezuijen, briefly sketched the events before the crash and its aftermath to reporters.

“At this moment, rescue operations are still in full force,” he said. “At this moment, nine mortally wounded are to be regretted. About 50 wounded persons have been brought to hospital in Amsterdam and Haarlem.”

Survivors told Turkish television that the events took place very quickly. Dutch authorities are promising a quick investigation, and so far, they say, it’s unclear just what caused the crash.

The plane’s manufacturer Boeing is sending a team to provide technical assistance to Dutch investigators. A spokesman for the investigators said the plane’s flight data recorders had been found and will be analyzed by experts.

Turkish Airliner Crashes at  Amsterdam Airport, Killing 9 People

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