(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-06 09:10

Moscow -- A fire tore through a nursing home in Russia, killing at least 30 people, emergency officials said Monday. Some elderly residents were evacuated on stretchers while others jumped from second floor windows in the latest deadly blaze.

Firefighters attempt to extinguish a fire at a nursing home in Velye-Nikolskoye in this image made from TV broadcast, November 5, 2007.  [Agencies]

The fire broke out Sunday afternoon in the two-story home for elderly and disabled people in the Tula region, south of Moscow, and burned quickly through the 55-year-old brick building with wooden walls before the flames were extinguished, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said.

Fire inspectors earlier had asked courts to order the nursing home closed because of fire safety violations, including the lack of an alarm system, he said.

More than 250 people escaped or were evacuated from the building and hospitalized or placed in other nursing homes, but emergency workers were finding bodies in the wreckage, Beltsov said. More than 24 hours after the fire broke out, the death toll stood at 30, he said.

"When the room filled with smoke -- black carbon monoxide fumes -- I knew I wouldn't have time to tie sheets together and decided to just jump out the window," said survivor Mikhail Zhuravlyov, 45, lying in a hospital bed with a cast on his leg. "I jumped, and lost consciousness for a while."

Most of the victims, and possibly all of them, were elderly residents of the nursing home in the town of Velye-Nikolskoye, about 155 miles south of Moscow, Beltsov said.

The fire was likely caused by a short circuit or carelessness, he said.

He said it appeared personnel at the home were to blame for the high death toll. Firefighters were only alerted of the blaze half an hour after it broke out, and employees "did not organize the effective evacuation" of residents, he said, citing preliminary information.

But a nurse said employees rushed to evacuate residents, many of them bedridden.

"They had to be carried out on stretchers, on gurneys, pushed through windows," Valentina Chernikova said on Vesti-24 television. "I think we did this very quickly."

Twice in the past year following inspections, fire authorities appealed to courts to order the facility shut down because of "glaring violations" of fire safety rules, Beltsov said. He said the building had no fire alarm and no system that would automatically alert the fire department of a blaze.