In June 1989, the largest railway disaster in the history of the USSR and modern Russia occurred, known as the “Asha Tragedy” or “Tragedy near Ufa”.
A powerful explosion of a cloud of light hydrocarbons occurred as a result of an accident on the Siberia-Ural-Volga pipeline near the city of Asha when two passenger trains, No. 211 “Novosibirsk-Adler” and No. 212 “Adler-Novosibirsk”, passed by. The explosion was so powerful that all the glass within a few kilometers of the epicenter was shattered. Eyewitnesses described how the air seemed to turn into flames.
The official version is that the gas leak was caused by damage to the overpass caused by an excavator during its construction in 1985. A narrow gap 1.7 meters long formed in the pipeline, and gas accumulated in the lowland where the Trans-Siberian Railway ran. Local residents and train drivers smelled the gas, but no one imagined that it could lead to such a catastrophe.
Eleven carriages were thrown off the rails, of which seven were completely burned. The fire caused by the explosion spread over an area of about 250 hectares, and 350 meters of railway tracks and 17 kilometers of overhead communication lines were destroyed. According to some sources, 573 people died, more than 600 people received severe burns and bodily injuries, of which 623 became disabled.
In June 1989, relatives of the victims from Chelyabinsk united in the “Association of Relatives of the Victims and Injured near Asha” and asked the railway management to allocate a special train to travel to the site of the tragedy, which became known as the “Memory Train”. In 1992, an eight-meter monument in the form of two grieving figures separated by a symbolic fire was erected at the site of the memorial. Three route boards from the cars of the Novosibirsk-Adler train are located around the monument. Relatives of the victims visit this place to give thanks and pay homage to the departed. They place flowers and photographs on the memorial slabs and light memorial candles. In 1999, a museum of the history of medicine in the city was opened in Chelyabinsk, which has a separate exhibition dedicated to the “Asha tragedy”. The museum contains a register of victims admitted from Asha, as well as a model of a burn center that was never built, based on the idea of burn specialist Professor Roman Lifshitz.