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Construction of the subway began in 1951 in the capital of the then Soviet republic, Azerbaijan, and in 1967 the first 6.5-kilometer line was inaugurated. The network continued to expand in the 1970s and 1980s, but little maintenance work was done. Obsolete accessories and equipment have led to more frequent breakdowns, and the situation has only worsened due to the turmoil that followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union and worsening economic difficulties. The hell machine exploded twice in the Baku subway in 1994, presumably political opponents of President Heydar Aliyev. –, these murders claimed twenty lives.
On Saturday night, October 28, 1995, during rush hour, one of the crowded five-car trains had just left a station on the northern line called Ulduz, when passengers saw smoke and then smelled acrid. As it turned out, under the fourth car a fire broke out due to a short circuit in the power line during the fixing of the turntable, forcing the train to stop in the tunnel after 200 meters. But not so much the fast-spreading dead flames as the poisonous gases: Metrovagonmas cars, made in the late 1960s, used particularly flammable materials from which hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide were released.
The driver immediately notified the duty officer, but in the midst of that beheading, he forgot to turn off the high-voltage line called the third rail that runs along the side of the tunnel. The driver, on the other hand, turned off the power on the set, so panic reigned in the dark. Desperate passengers drowning in smoke and toxic gases tried to break free by breaking windows, said one of the survivors, as people got out of the cars behind the other’s back. Many suffered a fatal electric shock when falling on a live rail.
About a quarter of an hour after the fire broke out, the ventilation system was started, but by mistake in the wrong direction,
thus, the fans only blew smoke and a cloud of poisonous gas towards the next station, almost two kilometers away.
And when the survivors reached the next subway station, they did not receive immediate medical attention because ambulances were sent to the previous station. So all they could get was stabbed.
As with Chernobyl, authorities tried to shrink the disaster to the old Soviet pattern, with early reports reporting just two deaths and a hundred smoke poisonings. The next day they were forced to admit that the misfortune claimed the lives of 289 people. In addition, there were 28 children among the victims, most of whom were found in an assembly that turned out to be a death trap, where they were trampled to death amidst the crowd and panic.
Initially it was suspected that the attacks of the previous months had caused the fire with an explosive device, but a commission of investigation in which foreign experts participated revealed a series of technical and human errors that led to the trial of two chief engineers of the metro and 15 shift bosses in 10 years in prison. . The main culprit was still blamed for the poor maintenance of the subway network inherited from the Soviet Union.
The network was still in disrepair ten years after the tragedy, before the modernization of the oil-rich South Caucasus country began. Even in the early 2000s, it was common for the Baku metro to run at speeds of 5 to 10 kilometers between stations due to the poor condition of the trains and tracks, and there was only little light along the line due to a poor power supply. Since then, the relationship has received new trains from the Azerbaijani traveling public.
It is memorable that fires were also common on the M3 line in Budapest, which is currently awaiting further renovation, and for some years firefighters were alerted to smoke fixtures almost daily. The Budapest metro was operated by the same type manufactured by Metrovagonmas as in the Azerbaijani capital and many other Eastern bloc countries. Since the replacement of blue trains by modernized cars baptized as panda because of their black and white color began three years ago, they no longer have to wait for such problems, said Endre Bíró, director of the Metro Association.
Baku was the most serious subway accident in history. Before that, 97 people died in 1918 when one of the New York subway trains derailed, and in 1903, 84 people died in a fire in a subway in Paris. Accidents could still be traced back to rudimentary technique at this time, but not in London in 1975, when 43 passengers died because a crowded train passed through the terminal and hit a wall.
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