Fire at nursing home kills at least 10 in Siberia

Fire swept through a nursing home early Thursday in Siberia, killing at least 10 people in the latest in a series of deadly blazes _ many caused by neglect of safety rules.

Rescuers safely evacuated more than 300 patients from the facility in the village of Yekaterininskoye in western Siberia's Omsk region after the fire began, but 10 patients died, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said.

Four people were hospitalized with burns and other injuries, the Omsk regional administration said.

Beltsov said the hospital's fire alarm system worked properly, but a nurse on duty was away at the time and failed to immediately alert patients and call firefighters.

"The delay resulted in fatalities," he said.

He said the fire began in the upper floor of the three-story nursing home and had apparently been caused by the violation of fire safety rules by patients, many of whom were drunk after a party.

Alexander Glazunov, a regional emergency official, suggested in televised comments that the fire may have started in a common area where people were watching TV and smoking the night before.

Russia records nearly 18,000 fire deaths a year, several times the per capita rate in the United States and other Western countries. Deadly blazes at schools, hospitals and other state-run facilities in recent years have revealed official negligence and rampant violations of fire safety rules.

The accidents were grim reminders of official corruption and negligence, crumbling infrastructure and short life expectancy that plague Russia despite economic improvements under President Vladimir Putin, who presided over economic growth driven by high world prices for the giant nation's energy resources.

A fire in a nursing in the Azov Sea coast village of Kamyshevatskaya in southern Russia killed 62 people in March. A night watchman ignored two fire alarms before reporting the blaze.

It took firefighters nearly an hour to get to Kamyshevatskaya from a larger town, but firefighters responding to Thursday's blaze arrived just five minutes after getting word of the fire, Beltsov said.

He said the nursing home had been checked twice recently by inspectors who found safety norms were duly observed. There were no violations, such as locked safety exits or barred windows, Beltsov said.

The regional authorities had spent more than $770,000 in the last two years to renovate the nursing home, which was considered one of the best in the region, the provincial administration said.