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Russian ammo dump catches fire again, town bombarded
May 30, 2011, 12:56 GMT
Moscow - A Russian ammo dump caught fire for the second time in a week on Monday, with exploding munitions forcing a repeat evacuation of hundreds of people.
Firefighters were having difficulty approaching the artillery ammunition depot in Russia's Central Asian Bashkorstan province because of shell explosions and flying metal, according to news reports.
More than 1,000 residents of the nearby village of Urman abandoned their homes aboard buses provided by local officials, the Interfax news agency reported.
It was not clear from early reports what caused the fire.
The blaze came in the wake of a Thursday conflagration at the same storage site. Army investigators have blamed a soldier who allegedly tossed live shell casings into a pile, which is believed to have touched off one of the shell detonators.
A massive fire ensued with hundreds of explosions and flying shrapnel forcing the evacuation of more than 7,000 people from neighbouring villages. Firemen were only able to put out the fire a day later.
The former Soviet Union contains hundreds of aging ammunition warehouses built and stocked during the Cold War.
Russia's worst ammunition dump accident in recent years came in November 2009 near the Ural Mountain city of Ulyanovsk, where a series of explosions killed ten and injured dozens.
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