On July 15, 2014, five years ago, the largest man-made disaster in the history of the Moscow metro took place. 24 people were killed, and four responsible officers were convicted and sentenced to real terms of imprisonment.
How did the accident happen
On a summer morning on July 15, 2014, nothing foreshadowed a tragedy. People rode quietly in subway cars. At approximately 08:35 Moscow time, in the section of the tunnel between the stations "Pobedy Park" and "Slavyansky Boulevard" of the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line, towards the station "Minskaya", three front cars of the electric train collided with the wall of the tunnel and derailed.
The electric train model 81-740 / 741 "Rusich" was traveling at a speed of 70 km / h. The cars that crashed into and derailed from the rails were so damaged that the emergency rescue teams who arrived at the scene immediately realized that there would be victims, and many. Naturally, the metro management immediately closed the entire section of the route from Park Pobedy to Kuntsevskaya to traffic. The city authorities have launched 66 buses to carry passengers evacuated from subway stations.
At the station "Slavyansky Boulevard", in the area of which rescue operations were taking place, ambulances, fire trucks, and crews of the police patrol service arrived. However, for about 40 minutes, the rescuers could not reach the injured during the collision of the carriages, as the voltage was removed from the contact rail for too long. Many passengers began to break car windows and get out of them with emergency hammers on their own, and then move through the tunnel. Only forty minutes later, the emergency services personnel managed to get to the carriages.
Rescuers of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of the Russian Federation began to rescue passengers who remained in the damaged cars. One of the cars was so deformed that the rescuers had to resort to the help of hydraulic tools - this was the only way to get the injured people out of the Moscow "subway".
Rescuers brought 189 people from the metro to the surface. The condition of some of the rescued people was so grave that at 10:20 a helicopter of disaster medicine arrived at the Slavyansky Boulevard station. The victims, who were in the most serious condition, were evacuated on it.
So many corpses, unconscious people. There was nowhere to go. We found an opening covered with tin sheets, fittings and thick cables. They knocked down the fittings with a hammer, squeezed out the tin sheets, - wrote on a social network one of the victims of this disaster, Alexander Zagnibeda.
The only thing that reassured both the rescuers and the public was that there seemed to be no children among the victims. But this only made it a little easier - as soon it was possible to establish, the accident claimed the lives of 24 people. Twenty people died at the scene, and four more died in the intensive care unit of the hospital. In total, 217 people were injured, of which 150 were hospitalized, and 47 people were in serious condition.
There were no such accidents before
The terrible accident in the Moscow metro immediately drew attention to the general technical condition of the Moscow "subway". The public immediately began to remember all the malfunctions that had occurred in the work of the Moscow metro, tragic incidents with people falling rails, and so on. In 2014, as the head of the Moscow metro, Ivan Besedin, told the press at the time, more than 2 thousand failures occurred in the metro, but most of them were the passengers' fault. Most of these failures were due to the fact that they held the doors, preventing the trains from moving.
But there were no such accidents in the history of the Moscow metro at all. The disaster on July 15, 2014 was the largest such accident. Prior to that, the largest accident was considered the disaster at the Aviamotornaya station in February 1982, when, due to an escalator malfunction, people rolled down and fell. Then 8 people were killed, and 30 people were injured.
Since the version of a terrorist act was ruled out by the investigative and operational services almost immediately, one thing was clear - the accident was due to technical reasons. It was necessary to identify them, as well as to increase the overall control over the state of the metro in order to protect passengers and employees from the repetition of such tragedies in the future.
Major versions of the disaster
On the same day, July 15, 2014, the Investigative Committee of Russia opened a criminal case on the fact of the metro accident. Investigators and forensic experts began to work at the crash site, interviews were conducted with witnesses and employees of the Moscow Metro and other organizations. Since the version of the terrorist act was immediately swept aside, the investigators considered several probable causes of the tragedy - the malfunction of the train cars, the subsidence of the canvas, the malfunction of the arrow.
In the first hours after the accident, a version of a power surge was also considered, which, according to some EMERCOM employees, could lead to a sharp deceleration of the train. But after the investigative actions, it turned out that there was no power surge. This means that only the versions about the reasons connected either with the malfunction of the cars, or with problems on the way of the train remained "working".
Investigators soon established that the switch mechanism had been improperly secured along the way. Investigators said that the arrow was fixed with a 3-millimeter wire. They also found the "switchmen" - on July 16, the senior road foreman of the track service Valery Bashkatov and the assistant of the foreman Yuri Gordov were detained.
Then two more guilty persons were found - the deputy head of the overhaul distance of the track service of the Moscow Metro, Alexey Trofimov, and the production director of Spetstekhrekonstruktsiya LLC, Anatoly Kruglov. OOO Spetstekhrekonstruktsiya was a contractor organization that performed work under the contract.
The "switchmen" answered for the accident
The investigation of the tragedy in the Moscow metro was carried out according to the general scheme characteristic of incidents of this kind - to find several guilty persons in the junior and middle ranks of technical employees, to bring them to justice. This scheme was tested back in late Soviet times and remains working today.
Lawyer Albert Khaleyan confirms that in the event of man-made accidents and catastrophes, most often the direct executors who made inaccuracies during the repair, construction or maintenance work, as well as middle managers, are recognized as guilty. They can be attracted under several articles of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, for example, under Article 293 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation "Negligence". But if we talk about a specific incident, then the persons found guilty of this accident were convicted under Article 263 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation "Violation of traffic safety rules and the operation of railway, air, sea and inland water transport and the subway." They were found guilty of committing a crime under Part 3 of Art. 263 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - acts that, through negligence, resulted in the death of two or more persons.
What is the responsibility provided by law?
- Part 3 of Article 263 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation provides for liability in the form of either forced labor for up to 5 years, or imprisonment for up to 7 years. As you can see, there is no lower threshold of liability in the article - the decision is made by the court. But here the case was resonant, and 24 people died. Therefore, three of the perpetrators received 5, 5 years of imprisonment, and one - the assistant to the master Yuri Gordov - received 6 years of imprisonment as recognized as the direct culprit. As the saying goes, "they found the switchmen" in the literal sense - senior road foreman Valery Bashkatov and his assistant Yuri Gordov. In fact, only the performers received the real terms - an assistant foreman, a senior road foreman, two middle managers. The higher authorities got off with a "slight fright". For example, the head of the Moscow Metro, Ivan Besedin, was brought in only as a witness.
True, he lost his position as head of the metro, but in 2015 he moved to senior positions at Russian Railways. As is often the case, despite the colossal responsibility that such high-paying and high-status, by the way, positions seem to imply, none of the top managers of the Moscow Metro answered for what happened.
Who is responsible for the safety of the metro and who should pay compensation to the victims and relatives of the victims?
- First of all, its management is responsible for the safety of the metro. Not a construction organization involved in attracting any work, but a management. When this catastrophe occurred, the Moscow mayor's office decided to pay the families of each victim 1 million rubles, and the victims - 500 thousand rubles. In addition, the metro was to pay the families of the victims 2 million rubles each. The total amount of payments exceeded 100 million rubles. But it is worth noting that 15 million rubles in total should have been paid to the victims or the relatives of the victims and the persons whom the court found to be the direct culprits of the incident.
Naturally, the main part of compensation in the event of such a disaster, whether it be a railway or an aviation disaster, should be paid by the carrier company, which is responsible for the safety of passengers, for the serviceability of equipment - in this case, metro trains, rails, and so on.
The court denied the metro
In July 2017, the Moscow Metro filed a lawsuit against Mosinzhproekt JSC and the Spetstekhrekonstruktsiya company, which was the direct producer of work in the same tunnel on the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line. The metro demanded to collect 331.7 million rubles from the companies. damage. The trial went on for a long time, but, in the end, the Moscow Arbitration Court refused to satisfy the claim of the metro in full.
The Metropolitan did not provide the court with documents that would allow a full assessment of the amount of damage. In addition, the direct perpetrators of the accident were convicted under a criminal article, but the metro did not put forward financial demands to them for understandable reasons - how could the craftsmen have found more than 330 million rubles to compensate for the damage to the metro? Therefore, the likelihood of a court decision in favor of the plaintiff - the metro was initially very doubtful, - says lawyer Andrey Lisov.
The disaster in the Moscow metro drew the attention of the whole country to the safety of transportation in this most popular metropolitan form of transport. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin was forced to pay special attention to the situation in the Moscow subway. After the dismissal of Ivan Besedin, Dmitry Pegov, a young and energetic manager who headed the directorate of high-speed communications of Russian Railways, was appointed the new head of the Moscow Metro.
Under the leadership of Pegov, a number of measures were taken to prevent emergencies, including increased control over locomotive crews and repairmen, a number of repairs were carried out, and "technological windows" were introduced to temporarily stop traffic in certain sections for the purpose of quick repairs. The rules for the commissioning of new stations have also become more stringent.
In 2017, Pegov returned to JSC "Russian Railways" already to the position of Director for Passenger Transportation, and then Deputy General Director. Now the metro is headed by Viktor Kozlovsky, who was his first deputy during the leadership of Pegov.
