An airport burned to the ground outside the city of Krasnoyarsk on Monday, possibly because the facility did not have the authorization to fight fire on its own premises, reports said.
Firefighters arrived at the Cheremshanka airport only after the blaze engulfed 1,200 square meters of the passenger terminal, RIA-Novosti .
No one was injured in the fire, which was tentatively blamed on faulty wiring. The blaze covered 3,000 square meters at its height and took some 100 emergency workers to extinguish, the report said.
There were no passengers on the premises at the time. One flight control dispatcher was briefly trapped by the fire, but successfully rescued.
Cheremshanka was fined 40,000 rubles ($1,250) in November for having no license to fight fire, but failed to obtain one, local prosecutor Olesya Davydenko .
Regional transportation officials denied any violations, but the Krasnoyarsk branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry said the airport was slow in notifying the firefighters, possibly due to trying to stop the fire themselves, local news web site Dela.ru .
Cheremshanka, whose traffic capacity stood at 400 passengers per hour, mostly served workers from the nearby Vankorskoye oil field and Boguchanskaya hydropower plant.
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