One person was killed and two were reported missing after a blaze early Tuesday in a Moscow nightclub that had previously been closed twice because of fire safety violations and where a small fire broke out in late January.
Fire safety violations in the Opera nightclub on Ulitsa Tryokhgorny Val near the Ulitsa 1905 Goda metro station were similar to those discovered in the Khromaya Loshad, or "Lame Horse," a Perm nightclub where 155 people died in a fire last December, a fire department spokesman told reporters.
Paths to the fire exits in the Opera were constructed out of flammable materials, such as wood and foam rubber, which allowed the fire to spread easily over an area of 1,200 square meters, spokesman Yevgeny Gusev said Tuesday, RIA-Novosti reported. The club also had no automatic fire extinguishing system, he said.
Moscow district prosecutors are investigating what started the fire, the Prosecutor General's Office said in a statement.
A small fire broke out in the nightclub in late January, but no one was injured, Gusev said.
Courts temporarily closed the Opera because of fire safety violations in March and December last year, RIA-Novosti reported, citing emergency officials.
The club reopened in January after coming in line with some of the regulations, but in February authorities fined the club's owner after an inspection revealed that the club had no automatic fire extinguishing system, Yevgeny Bobylev, a spokesman for the Moscow branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry, told RIA-Novosti.
Firefighters found the body of one man in the burning club, but two security guards are still missing, Bobylev told Interfax. Officials did not identify the victim or the missing guards.
Police woke up and evacuated about 250 people from a dormitory attached to the club, and a beauty salon located in the same building was destroyed, a city police source told RIA-Novosti.
Firefighters received a call about the blaze at about 3 a.m. Tuesday and extinguished it by 7 a.m., Bobylev said.
In early December, following the Perm tragedy, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered the Emergency Situations Ministry to inspect nightclubs and concert halls across the country. Moscow’s fire safety watchdog asked a court later that month to shut down 54 local nightclubs and cafes after inspections showed numerous fire safety violations.
While fire safety violations have remained a consistent problem throughout the country in recent years, Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu told reporters last year that fires killed a total of 13,148 people in 2009, a decrease of 11 percent from 15,165 people in 2008. He said firefighters were called to extinguish about 200,000 fires, a drop of 8.2 percent from the previous year.
Even so, Tuesday's fire at the Opera was just one of several incidents in the past few days.
A fire in a wooden dormitory in a Bashkortostan village killed five people, including a child, on Sunday, RIA-Novosti reported. The cause of the fire is being determined.
In Perm, a fire broke out early Tuesday at a plant owned by one of Russia's largest petrochemicals companies, Sibur, and rapidly spread more than 300 square meters, RIA-Novosti reported. Firefighters were able to contain the blaze enough to prevent an explosion, and there were no casualties.
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