The Great Baku Metro Fire of 1995 | Episode 85

We all complained about our commutes. We all think we have a pretty bad But unless your commute includes choking to death on toxic fumes, for being claustrophobically trampled in the dark while on fire, well prepared to eat your feelings. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we're going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and uninspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll learn what makes the world capital of mud Fart so fascinating. We'll discover why Soviet utilities designed for utilitary and benefit of masses are so flammable. And I'll make you understand the analogy that you don't survive a skydive accident just to get eaten by alligators. And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you would hear about the marketing plan that included a media budget for murdering an elephant. We would answer the question what's the most aggressively violent disaster your hometown completely forgot. You would learn why transit authority could have for removal kits include a kind of an industrial spatula, and you would learn why trauma professionals call today's kind of injury the barbecue effect. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, sure the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's pig in. I know I'm never really going to be able to see the world the way that I might have liked before I die, So this show has become a bit of a bloody circuit for my fading dreams, which is why it is such a pleasure to visit some new and interesting part of the world for the first time. We've been to some fairly unique and dramatic landscapes on this show before, but nothing quite like Azerbaijan. You're all all right, tell us about the beaches and the shopping, but right off the top, those are the least interesting things about Azerbaijan. You know how people say they're great ideas to open a restaurant or a fueling station right on the side of a highway. Well, a few thousand years ago, when China kicked the doors open on international trade, the highway for that trade, for the lack of a better analogy, ran through Azerbaijan. They called it the Silk Road, and it made them a bit of an international hotspot. And because of this, it's literally one of the most strategically, historically and culturally interesting places on the world map. Azerbaijan sits at the crossroads of Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. And it's not even that big. It's roughly about the same size as South Carolina. That helps. It's smaller than Portugal. But you know what they say about sex and real estate, location is more important than size. And so they had a kind of a lot of visitors and a fluke of geography lined their pockets quite nicely for over fifteen hundred years. I mean, how lucky could a country get? Well, Okay, let's see fast forward to eighteen forty six and at the adorably named bb Haybat outside of the capital city of Baku, Azerbaijean became the first place in the world where oil was extracted and refined on an industrial scale, as the US or Saudi Arabia got in on the action, and by the early nineteen hundreds they were producing more than half of the oil in the world. So, yeah, sometimes lightning does strike twice, you know, kind of three times a bit. It's not just an abundance of natural oil. They also have massive natural gas reserves. Okay, well so does Canada. But but what we don't have are random flaming geysers and fountains of flames that have burned across our country for centuries. And that is why they call Azerbaijan the Land of Fire. People from around the world have pilgrimaged here to witness and pray to sacred burning hillsides and fens of ancient and mystical flame forever. Not far from Baku sits the Zoroastrian fire Temple of a Teeshka. It's this sprawling religious castle temple that protects an eternal sacred flame at it's part. It's this ancient religion that comes out of Persia. They basically believe in good and evil, and they believe in a single god, which was rare when you go back in time. And if you've ever heard that Zoroastrians worship fire, well kinda, but that's not entirely it. They don't worship fire. They just kind of pray to it as being symbolic of the Ahura Mazda, which was the ancient supreme Persian god we talked about, and that love of flame would become really on brand for their country. Jan Our Dog is this kind of mountain or hillside that has been burning for hundreds of years, and Instagrammers love to photograph themselves standing in front of it with outstretched arms, captioning their picks with phrases like where the Earth breathes fire hashtag so hot. So what else they got? Well? It's also the mud volcano capital of the world. I can't remember where we last ran into those, but yeah, they remain Earth's muddy fart holes. Mud volcanoes are kind of like anal geological vents that fart dirt and water gas, usually methane, which I guess is better than lava either way. Azerbaijan has over four hundred of them. That's more than any other country in the world, and just for fun, some of them double duty burp farting fire because they pair up with the gas reserves. This country offers so many interesting things that humans have been visiting here, reportedly for three hundred and fifty thousand years. In fact, one of the world's oldest prehistoric human settlements was found here in the oddly vaginal AzaC Cave. You know bones, fire pits, and tools, And just four hours away by car you'll find the Gobistan National Park, which features over six thousand rock engravings dating back as far as forty thousand years. Prehistoric stick people, stabbing animals, rituals, hunting scenes, you know, all the classics. Azerbaijan is home to one of the earliest traces of human habitation anywhere, even their ancient music. It's called Mugum. The only review of it i read was from UNESCO, who called it part of the quote intangible heritage of humanity. Azerbaijan's blend of history and crazy natural phenomenon and cultural richness makes it an utterly visitable country. This part of the world has been part of the Persian Empire. It's been invaded by everybody from Alexander the Great to Turkic tribes and Mongols came by, and even Bolshevik Russians. In fact, it found itself involuntarily sucked into the Soviet Union. All that history, all that heritage has left it with a real blend of Zoroastrian and Persian and Islamic and Christian and even Soviet influences. And maybe we'll get to check out some of that today. And another thing that makes them unique, well, religious tolerance is their bag. Today. Azerbaijan stands out as the only Muslim majority country in the world that maintains a secular government. It just means that you've got synagogues and mosques and Christian Church is all just coexisting for a deeply religious place. It's pretty progressive. Azerbaijani women even had the right to vote before the US or the UK. They are an unusually accommodating country in a part of the world that people don't really think of as accommodating. I mean yes, warmth and hospitality are deeply rooted in the culture of the region and outside of the cities, seeing a foreigner like us can be the kind of novelty that gets you a dinner invitation. But today we're going to be spending our time in the capital city of back who the lowest lying capital city in the world. See Azerbaijan sits on the shores of the Caspian Sea, but the capital sits ninety two feet below sea level. That bathtub overflows and back who is sitting under nine stories of water. I should also say that Caspian Sea it's not actually connected to the world's oceans, so technically it is the world's largest saltwater lake. Don't know how helpful this is as far as situating it in your head, but Azerbaijan is tucked in and kind of squeezed like a nipple pointing across the Caspian at Turkmenistan and surrounded by Iran and Armenia, Georgia and Russia. Obviously, finding itself situated halfway between Europe and China has definitely been good for it. And today it's as modern as hell, like oil money modern. When you see crebaceous architecture shaped like flames, yeah, you know they've got the kind of money to brand themselves from the bottom up. Baku stands out as one of the most developed cities in the entire region. Luxury hotels, shopping malls, office towers, by all of it. I mean they run f one Grand Prix races here. For crying out loud, that means you also expect infrastructure like railroads and harbors and international airports, and a fairly robust subway or metro system, which is exactly what brings us here today. Baku's metro system is very efficient and clean, and the trains run often and are actually very inexpensive. I don't know what the nearest subway to Yukos, but this one's about thirty cents, and the entire system is bilingual in English, so no worries there, huzzah. The Baku Metro has come a long way since it opened. Back in nineteen sixty seven. After World War II, Baku's population passed the one million mark, which by Soviet law, meant the people needed to be served by a metro system. Soviet cabinet ministers slapped their shoes on their desks and to create it to be back in nineteen forty seven, and the first shovels at the ground in nineteen fifty one. If you'll remember from our previous Soviet inspired episodes, the government had a massive boner to match deadlines with important Soviet anniversaries, and the Baku Metro was finished and opened on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. If you don't remember, the October Revolution happened back in nineteen seventeen when Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian government, and it was all hammers and sickles after that. In fact, Bolshevitz were the same guys who invaded Azerbaijan and sucked them into the USSR. We visited a metro station in Moscow once before, during our Aviamodornaya Escalator Disaster of nineteen eighty two episode. It was one of those infamous Soviet stations that they built so deep underground that it specifically doubled as a bomb shelter against nukes during the Cold War. The Baku system covers the whole city twenty seven stations spread across three different lines. When it opened, it was more like twelve stations across a single line, But it was all expansion in rainbows after that until the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of nineteen ninety one. Stepping into a Baku metro station still feels like entering a grand Soviet palace. The walls are lined with polished marble and deck raed with ornate chandeliers and mosaic murals. Celebrating workers and industry and just the whole Soviet vibe. But we're not here for the stations, Nah, We're here for the trains. Do you ever hear of Metro Wagon Mash brand metro cars? Well, Metro Wagon Mash, which we're just going to shorten to MVM, is one of the oldest industrial manufacturers in Russia. The name itself is just a portmanteau of different Russian words all cut up that roughly translates to metro car machine building plant. They started building freight wagons back in eighteen ninety seven, but they moved onto rail and metro cars after they were abducted into the ministry of heavy machine building. And what they made weren't exactly pullman cars, if you know what I mean. They had faux wood paneling and beij walls and linoleum flooring, and you would sit across parallel rows of hard plastic benches padded with you know, that kind of burgundy vinyl that cracks overtime, and all of it illuminated by fluorescent tube lighting that cast everything in a cold and bluish glow. But their job was to make them efficient, nah comfy, So they started building and rolling them out to metros across the Soviet Union. An MVM metro car measures about sixty feet long, they'll sit almost fifty and on a bad day, almost three hundred more could stand, which is a lot of people to cram into something shorter than four Dodge caravans, which also goes to make my ongoing point about trains being more efficient than passenger vehicles, and I've heard people describe them as having a kind of a brutal charm. Like all good Soviet manufacturing and design, the metro cars were designed for utilitarian benefit of masses, so they chose capacity and durability and function over any kind of comfort, which makes a contrast between these lavish stations and the metro cars striking. The people of the old Soviet Union would call this kind of a thing grandeur masking hardship. But we're not here to complain about austerity subways. We're here to catch a train. And our story takes place October the twenty eighth, nineteen ninety five. One of the main reasons to travel is to get a feel for everyday life in a new place. So let's start our day like a local by seeing how locals actually get around. Taking the Metro is a way to bathe in the culture and history of the place. We're going to start our exploration at the Alda station. Aldas is a mostly residential neighborhood in the northeastern part of Baku. The Oldo station sits on the red line of the Metro and it opened back in nineteen seventy and the trains might not win a lot of beauty contests, but the station, like many other former Soviet systems, most of the stations were exquisitely decorated. The design emphasizes spaciousness and elegance. Try to picture a long, spacious hall lined with with two rows of geographic columns and top by saw light stripes with light bulbs arranged in a chessboard pattern. The flooring merges black and green granite with white marble, recreating Azerbaijani carpet designs. The train will be catching today runs about one and a half miles or two and a half kilometers between old Dose station and Narrimanov Station in the west end, and we will be catching the five fifty eight pm train. It's right in the middle of rush hour, so we'll be squeezing in with just over a thousand other passengers. Don't worry, we'll find room. The doors close with a whoosh, and as we pull out of the station, we hear the traction motors rise into a familiar, high pitched electric wine. You might picture a Soviet era subway or metro and think the thing would run on diesel at belch exhaust out of the back like a bus, but no Diesel trains would have required extensive and extremely heavy ventilation systems to suck out all the toxic fumes and the soot and everything else where. Electric trains produce zero exhaust. And it's not just that you wouldn't think of it from a usage point of view, but you ever notice how much smoother and nicer an electric train ride can be compared to a bus. It's because electric motors provide instant torque. Do what well, if you know it by name but don't know what it actually does. Torque is the force that it takes to make something rotate, you know, like when you turn a doorknob or a steering wheel. It just means, unlike gas engines, electric engines will accelerate up to sixty miles or ninety kilometers an hour very quickly, and then slow down very efficiently, and we left in a bit of a hurry, so we didn't get to see what the people on the platform saw. I don't want to spoil anything by calling them witnesses, but witnesses saw a flash near the rear of the train just as soon as we left the station and entered the tunnel. I don't know what it was, but whatever it was, it happened fast, and within only seconds, passengers near the rear of the train started to smell smoke, and almost as quickly they could see it. White smoke was entering the train, but as quick as it appeared, it almost immediately turned black. And this is one of the things that firefighters watch out for. White smoke usually means steam or you're burning stuff like wood or paper, but once it turns black, that's usually a sign that synthetic materials like plastics or rubber or chemicals are involved. Our trip, in total, has taken less time than it has taken me to say this, and in this short of a time, Car four erupted into visible flames. More and more smoke was filling the air outside the train, and within seconds it blocked all the bulbs in the ceiling, plunging the entire tunnel into darkness. And it does not take long for a light panic to erupt, which is not helped as your metrocar is illuminated by the strobe like effect of the electrical system failing all around you. And at this point to a stop. And we've only traveled about six hundred and fifty feet or two hundred meters into the tunnel, think a street parking for about forty Dodge caravans, and we stopped because the train systems were failing. The driver, Vadjif Grubinov, noticed the smoke, jumped out and rushed to find one of the tunnel emergency telephones to contact the traffic information center. What he told them was that for reasons, the train was on fire and they needed to evacuate, and he demanded that they shut off the power to the tunnel. From there, he just dropped the receiver and let the phone dangle all dramatic like while he assisted the evacuation by opening the doors at the front of the train, making it easier for passengers to escape. It was a five car train and the people on board did not need to be told to leave, and in less time than it should have taken for them to finish their trip all the way to Narmount of Station. Fire had clearly begun to consume Car four. The more the fire burned, the more smoke was generated, and it was a toxic, oozing smoke cobbled together out of flammable synthetic materials like the seating and the interior paneling. We've talked about this kind of thing before. If you are looking for anything more dangerous to breathe than burning synthetics, you are probably going to need to visit Jupiter. The train was made up of five cars. Like I said, Cars four and five were by now very much on fire, and when people in our car tried to evacuate, they were greeted with malfunctioning doors that were jammed shut. I always say there's nothing panic loves more than surprise. That is to say, the way a broken escalator becomes stairs, a broken door becomes a wall. And this is a busy train in complete darkness. You can picture people clawing at each other, trying to escape or orient themselves in the heart of madness. It wasn't long before they started bashing out the windows. Of course, every new opening was a new way for smoke to enter the car and make things even worse. In the chaos, people were being crushed and trampled. It's hard to imagine the sensation of panic, your heart pounding through your shirt and gulping down air, only to realize you're gulping things that really don't count as air. You've got one hundred thousand years of genetic programming screaming at you to do whatever it takes to get away from the danger. But you are being poisoned, and your limbs are becoming weaker by the second, followed by your thinking, followed by your lifespan, and when you get to heaven or wherever it is you're heading. And they asked, so, how did you like Azerbaijan, You'll say the last thing you remember were the shoe and bootprints of a thousand screaming people, either hoofing you in the ribs and skull and generally flattening out your ribs and bones because they couldn't see you. For reference, if someone is light as one hundred and thirty or one hundred and fifty pounds ran over you, they could absolutely break your ribs. The result of all of this was obviously people being crushed or trampled. And how many of those people would stop to make sure that you were okay, or try to drag you to safety, or even just prop you up to save you from being trampled. Well, the answer would be none, zero people, And don't judge. I want to remind you you're in a confined space with benches and tripping hazards everywhere. You're in complete darkness. People are screaming over the sounds of flames erupting all around you, and the air is hot and choking and toxic, so you cannot expect anyone to help you. But when I did say zero people, well that wasn't entirely true. A man named sh singhiz Babeyev was an officer in the army who also happened to be aboard the train. At the time. He was young. He was only thirty, but he was a senior lieutenant at a local military academy with a reputation for being calm and disciplined. Honestly, no two better qualities to hold in a situation like this, Since premonition and freeze breath weren't on the table. Well, there is no scarier meat grinder of a litmus test for that calm. When disaiented passengers started to lose it in the dark, instead of booking at double time back to the station and doing jumping jacks till the media arrived to interview him, he helped evacuate the train and guided people to safety. He took charge, keeping people calm and organizing as orderly an evacuation as possible for those near him. In fact, he kept coming back to the train to help others again and again, sometimes physically carrying people who couldn't walk on their own. One reporter said, after saving everyone in his car, he then entered the next car to continue helping. We'll never know exactly how many people he saved because it was pitch black. Many survivors have no idea how they got out of the tunnel, and even if this had all gone down at a light bulb festival. Trauma can cause dissociative amnesia basically happens, but the brain becomes so overwhelm by the stress and the fear from it it blocks those memories as a defense mechanism. All we know for sure is that he saved dozens of lives until all that exposure to the heat and the smoke left him too weak to continue singhas Babayev was found among the dead in the tunnel. Smoke and fire quickly made the escape down the tunnel back to Uldu station difficult, if not impossible, especially for those in the forward three cars. They were not going to be shimmying past laming train cars, so most passengers had to try their luck by hoofing it two kilometers or one point two miles towards the next station at Naramanov. The thing about escaping through Uldez was also the fact that the best route to safety was the exact same route that most of the smoke followed. For those in the tunnel, still, it was impossibly difficult. And I'll tell you why metro tunnels are meant for trains, not people. I will do my best not to standardize this as any kind of unit of measurement in the future, but the amount of wiggle room available to those in the tunnel was comparable to the size of a child's coffin. They also lack handrails or walkways, unless you are in a tunnel designed with a dedicated emergency path which I have to tell you we are not. There's a trench that runs between the rails that makes it kind of difficult to walk. It's filled with this mixture of uneven concrete and gravel, and there's metal ties there to twist your ankle or trip you up. And most passengers found themselves kind of grasping cables along the cold, clammy, dirty, filthy wall to support and guide them, and the whole thing felt eerie and hostile. You move cautiously, feeling your way along, but every fiber of your being is screaming at you to run back on the train. Yes, people clawd and pod at each other in the dark, desperate to flee the flames and the suffocating smoke. But as it turns out, there was something just as dangerous in the tunnel with us that no one could see, humming away silently inches from their feet and carrying enough electricity to stop a heart cold. You ever hear of the third rail? Well, electric trains run on two rails, but there is a third rail, and its whole purpose is to carry high voltage electricity to make it run. And it's not loud, it doesn't glow, and it doesn't spark. You can't hear it vibrating, and sometimes it gets covered by a little bit of a metal shroud and it runs along the side of the track. But either way, even if you saw it, you'd just think it was some unassuming piece of the infrastructure, just some dull metal bar that carries eight hundred and twenty five volts of direct current. For reference, eight hundred and twenty five volts is more than three times more powerful than the strongest, most energy inefficient appliance in your house. And touch it the wrong way, and that's that. You won't scream, You won't actually react at all. All you'll feel is a violent jolt go through your body that locks up and seizes all of your muscles, including your heart, which I'm afraid is silently and wordlessly coming to a stop. So you got conned into visiting a foreign country by a podcast that promised everything would be on fire, but instead you find yourself stuck in a subway tunnel in the dark, playing keep away with a hidden power line. Would you know what to do if you came into contact with the third rail, even for a fraction of a second, you are facing immediate unconsciousness respiratory paralysis and a cardiac arrest. Electricity does a great job of knocking the needle off the record for you. It's called ventricular fibrillation. Basically, the heart stops pumping blood, which leads to a sudden drop in blood pressure, which brings on unconsciousness and yeah, then death. And you get a strong enough jolt, and your heart's ventricles will quiver twitch erratically instead of actually pumping blood. Sudden collapse, no pulse, no breathing. An electrical current basically disrupts the nervous system, making a game of broken telephone between your brain and your vital organs. And of course it can also cause severe muscle contractions like I said, which would make you uncontrollably hug the thing that is killing you. And wherever you touch any point of contact, it usually sustains deep electrical burns that can destroy muscle and nerves and even bone along the path of where the electricity flows. All that, plus your skin can carbonize from the heat, meaning literally burning and breaking down the proteins and tissues like overcooked meat till all you have left is charred, crispy carbon. Well, that and brain damage from all the knot breathing, and organ failure from all of the internal burns. Bottom line for long contact with the third rail is usually instantly fatal. But let's say you just grazed it. Let's say you took a hit, but no one came to waving to a tunnel of white light about it. Let's see what we can do to give you your best chance of recovery. First things, first, stop touching stuff. If someone's already been electrocuted and they're not in contact with the thing that was electrocuting them, their body cannot store electrical current, so you can feel free to touch them safely. If they're still draped over a third rail. In this case, use a wooden broom or anything non conductive you can find to pry them free. I know one story where someone wrapped their T shirt around someone's neck and lifted them off a power line. But let's assume the person we're talking about has not burned to a crisp by now. Are they conscious? Electrical injuries don't always show right away. They could fall over from delayed cardiac arrhythmia or internal bleeding after the fact, So first thing first, get them to lay flat and calm them if possible, and get someone to call nine one one. But what if they were breathing but unconscious, Well, you ever hear of the recovery position. What you do is you gently roll them onto your side. You gently roll them onto their side facing you, and tilt their head back slightly, and this keeps their airway open, and then you sort of prop them up by bending their top leg and resting it over the bottom leg to stabilize them and keep them warm with a jacket or a blanket or whatever you can find. But if they're not breathing, you want to begin CPR immediately and have someone go and find a defibrillator. We haven't covered CPR in a while, so no better time than now to review. No breathing meets no heartbeat, So what you're going to want to do is place your hands in the center of their chest and put push on repeat and keep a steady tempo. They always say to keep it to the beat of staying alive by the begis. But just google a list of songs between one hundred and one hundred and twenty beats per minute and just pick your favorite. Pick something that you'll know you'll remember under stress. Some will be happy to learn that Kelly Clarkson's What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger works perfectly. So how about that hand position. What you do is you place the heel of one of your hands basically between the nipples on the lower half of the breastbone, put your other hand on top and interlock your finger and then just pump. That is literally what you are doing. You are pumping for the heart. And here's a tip you won't always here. Lock your elbows and keep your arms straight like you got to kind of prop yourself upwards, but you get to use your body weight to push down instead of your arms, which will save you a lot of energy, because this is not the kind of job that you want to wear out while doing. And speaking of breathless, if they're not breathing, what you're going to do or called rescue breaths. You tilt the head back and lift the chin. That opens up the airway. You're all ready to go. Just pinch the nose so you're not blowing into their sinuses and give them two quick breaths about one second long. And if you're going to do it, you want to do it right, So watch to make sure that it's working. If you can see their chest rising, if it's not, kind of reposition their neck a bit, get that airway open, keep going, and if they don't sit up and say thank you, then that's what you're gonna do. Continue the compressions. Do thirty compressions followed by two breaths, and then back to another thirty compressions, and you don't stop until help arrives, or the person wakes up, or a family legal representative presents you with a do not resuscitate order. You've got two types of current. This is DC, or direct current. It's arguably more dangerous than alternating current, which would also cause massive muscle contraction. But AC is alternating current. So you know, when you see someone touch something electrical and they cartoonishly fly across a room, that's AC. So since you're not melting into a wire, it's technically safer. When people in the tunnel under Baku coming to contact with the third rail didn't warn people around them, it was because they couldn't and the people around them, let's call them the still alive, had no idea that they were navigating around a loaded weapon. And here's where I make the point that you do not survive a plane crash only to get eaten by alligators, and you do not survive a subway fire just to get electrocuted. The third rail is always armed and simply doesn't care if it kills you. And all of this could have been prevented if the power had been turned off, but clearly that didn't happen. In fact, it took more than fifteen minutes for them to finally turn it off. Same for reversing the ventilation, you know, to evacuate the smoke. And I said, how those who stumbled backwards towards Ouldu's station shared the space with all that toxic soup, and how the vast majority of people opted for the endless slog in the dark to the next station. For those first fifteen minutes, most of that smoke was being pushed with them towards the next station, and it was a lot of smoke. This was a huge problem. When emergency services arrived, that smoke and all the electrical issues kept them from even entering the tunnel. They found themselves stuck helping those who made it to the surface, and worse, they were only helping people at Uldou's as people began to arrive at Naramanov station without tripping or choking or electrocuting to death. They found themselves all like hello. No one had been disp there, and it took hours for the fire to run out of flammable material and for the responders to finally make their way to the train. By the time the last survivor made it out of the tunnel, depending on which source you except, three hundred and three people had not. Thirty seven passengers and three responders were also found outside the train. Two hundred and sixty three victims had been found inside. Over five hundred people were hospitalized. Two hundred and seventy of those were treated for severe injuries related to smoke inhalation or crush injuries or electrocution, and most died from suffocation, which is what you're hoping to hear, right. Well, I didn't get a full list of the autopsies, and most did die from the smoke, but a significant number of the dead had been killed under the boot of their fellow traveler. So what happened as soon as the shakwar off the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and Transferred Tation authorities Voltron into a state commission to investigate the causes of the disaster and assigned blame where needed. The fire began in the fourth car of a five car train, and investigators traced the fire to an electrical box at the back of Car four. They concluded the primary cause had been a short circuit in the traction motor. This did explain why the train stopped on its own, in spite of the fact that the electrical system in the tunnel was clearly working very, very well. This short circuit caused an electric arc, which ignited flammable materials in the undercarriage of the car. Electrical arcing is where electric current jumps across a gap and it's loud and it looks pretty cool. It reduces intense heat and light and yep, even sparks. In this case, this most likely happened as a result of damaged or degraded insulation around some high voltage wiring. All that power jumped from one conductor to another, or in this case, to the metal frame of the train in itself, and this would have acted like a plasma torch, and the temperature produced would have exceeded five thousand degrees celsius or nine thousand fahrenheit. So, professor, could that have started the fire? Well, first starts, I'm not a professor, and secondly, for a reference, that temperature is only a smitch cooler than the surface of the sun, and continuous power from the third rail kept it alive until it was finally shut off, which in this case took a while. The effected cable ran under the car's floor, and when the electrical arc started, it burned the hell out of everything. It even burned through the asbestos in the floor, and from there it ignited the trains undercarriage and spread into the interior. It all happened incredibly fast, and it turns out about eighty percent of the materials inside the train were flammable. In an enclosed space like a subway car or a tunnel, there's little ventilation, which allows smoke and toxic gases to concentrate quickly, and most materials were synthetic, which is a recipe for a highly poisonous and unfortunate breathing experience. It's assumed that most of those who suffocated passed out within seconds and were dead within minutes, particularly from carbon monoxide exposure. Investigators also discovered that surprise surprise, maintenance was an ongoing issue, not just lapses, but they were using older Soviet era parts and they never got upgraded or replaced. It turns out they were just out of pocket on all of this, and following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with all their money now gone, and between all the political and rest at home and the ongoing First Negorno Karabak War against the Armenians next door, they were tapped. There'd actually been a whole new generation of train released just a few years earlier, with a way more flame resistant interior, but if they weren't replacing deteriorated wiring, they were not ponying up for new trains, and in transit systems all around the world, this remains an ongoing problem, insufficient funding. It's kind of like the insider motto for transit systems. Well that and wet my beak. See, there had also been reports of a little corruption, you know, maybe some of those line items and the budget paid for a new pool or a few cars, or who even knows. Will never know, because along with the transit system, the press was also government controlled and still running under some fairly restrictive Soviet standards. You report what we want you to report, that kind of thing. So what did they think of the emergency response? Well, first off, there was a complete absence of fire protection equipment on board the trains, no smoke detectors, no fire extinguishers, nothing. The train had also stopped in a tunnel between stations without lighting or ventilation, and passengers had no idea what to do. No instructions were ever given, even the staff they hadn't been trained for anything like this. And even worse, much much worse, they left the power on which pulled double duty electrocuting people while fleeing. I don't think you could draw a better death trap. The tunnel rapidly filled with toxic smoke, the emergency exit signs weren't visible, No one was trained, no instructions were given. Doors on the cars were jammed because of the electrical failure, which created a bottleneck and a stampede, and all because people were forced to try to escape by less traditional means. President Haidar Alayev and Azerbaijani government ordered three days of official mourning and flags flew at half massed throughout the country. Investigators found gross negligence in safety practices, in maintenance and the emergency preparedness. So it was time to lay some criminal charges. Ah Baku Metro executives and engineers and electrical systems inspectors and station supervisors were all arrested and charged with negligence resulting in death, failure to maintain critical infrastructure, and violations of fire safety regulations, and at least six of these people were formally prosecuted, and in the end the Supreme Court of Azerbaijan sentenced the driver fa Jeff Guberanov to fifteen years in prison and the station traffic controller to ten years for criminal negligence. I couldn't find their name, but he took the blame for the poor condition of the tunnel, the train and the slow emergency response. And I should point out that at the time people were pretty sure that these guys got scapegoaded. They were the lowest ranked employees on the chain that took the heat. Senior officials seemed to get through all of this just fine. Even today, thirty years later, there are still claims that the disaster was the result of a bomb or an arson attack. It wasn't worth bringing it up, but Azerbaijan faced all kinds of problems that you would call terrorism from Armenian militant groups, you know, bombings, assassinations, sabotage, just that kind of thing. There was a history of ethnic violence and warfare between Armenians and the Azerbaijanis, which we are not going to get into. Let's just say that a complete lack of solid evidence did not stop President Laev from making the claim that the whole disaster had been the result of a terrorist plot. To a US official, the disaster did lead to a safety audit of the whole system. They even asked Russia and Turkey and different parts of the European Union for their two cents to help bring their system up to international standards like fire detection and suppression systems and emergency lighting and communications and ventilation in the tunnels. It was pretty obvious stuff, but they were still trying to shake off the shackles of Soviet rules, which absolutely prioritized efficiency above safety. If I told you the government provided compensation to victims' families, you'd say, of course, that is the right thing to do. If I told you, whatever it was was criticized by the public as not being nearly enough well if you've listened to the show long enough, you'd probably just shake your head, because, as we've astilised, there's nothing quite like governmental compensation settlements to make people feel re victimized all over again. The trains of the Metro were upgraded a few times over the years and eventually retired in twenty twelve. And remember Singez Babayev. He was awarded the title of National Hero of Azerbaijan, which is the country's highest honor, for his courage and self sacrifice in saving a significant number of lives, and even today he is remembered as a proud national symbol of selfless heroism, and a memorial plaque lives at the Narriman of Metro station in his memory. This disaster became a case study for other countries running similar transit systems, who themselves now undertook their own safety audits. This was not a disaster or a death toll that anybody was looking to beat. The previous record was held by New York City. Maybe you remember a little something that we called the Malbourne Street disaster of nineteen eighteen episode where a subway derailed, collided with concrete pillars, and killed ninety three. Well, today we triple that number, creating a record for fatalities that has stood for three decades. The fire itself is still one of the worst to ever have occurred in an underground metro anywhere death toll aside, the fire alone is still one of the worst to have ever occurred in an underground transit system, and the disaster became a symbol of the decay of post Soviet urban infrastructure. The Great Baku Metro Fire of nineteen ninety five remains not only the deadliest disaster in Azerbaishan's civilian history, it is still the deadliest subway disaster in world history. About this disaster, a lot of people say there was a kind of mercy that, although it was horrifying to every sense that you have, the carbon monoxide would have knocked people out before they experienced any real true horror from the flames. And in sitting here and thinking about the things that people say after disasters to reassure others, and that they went on about the mercy of the carbon monoxide reminded me very much of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in nineteen eighty six. You might not have been alive to have seen it, but seventy three seconds into their trip into space, the Space Shuttle exploded, killing all seven crew members aboard. At least that's what my mom said. I watched it live, and my mom told me that, yes, it was terrible, but that it could have been worse because at least everyone would have been killed instantly. Vaporized was the word that she used. They wouldn't have known what had happened to them, and they wouldn't have spent time in fear or pain. And it's an incredibly comforting thought because she wanted to make it better for me. Of course, what she didn't know was that the nose cone had blown free from the rest of the Shuttle in the explosion, and that many of the crew were still conscious. They flew completely unable to change anything about their flight path, and this went on for an impossible to imagine two minutes and forty five seconds. They traveled twelve miles or nineteen kilometers before finally making contact with the ocean at over two hundred miles or three hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, and there's plenty of evidence that they were slapping every button they could, which means yes, they did live in fear, but they would have lost consciousness from the altitude at some point and been spared the knowledge of what came next. And these are the little mercies that we try to find in disasters like this. And two more very quick things about that, a civilian school teacher was on board for that flight for the first time, and the nation was absolutely heartbroken to see her die at the time. But what they did not know is at one point Big Bird from Sesame Street was going to be on that flight, a flight light that was obviously watched by every school in America live, and they would have watched Big Bird die. So yeah, little mercies. Well, if your second favorite podcast hasn't brung comfort to your soul over our shared fragility and empathic connection to the tragically deceased, why not consider becoming a supporter of the one show that does it really helped fulfill my dream of doing this full time. And if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a pucker two you have no idea what the future might hold. Before I tell you about Patreon. If you're into it but aren't looking for a whole relationship, you can visit me at buy me a coffee dot com slash Doomsday and just make a one time donation. And those of you who do, I do appreciate you. I myself think getting episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it and if you agree, you can find out more and join us all at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo. A quick but heartfelt shout out to Mike Dodgson, Rob Orton, Hey Rob, Jasmine Russo, Francine Alabama, and Fiel Fross. Sorry feel Frost. I hope I'm not mispronouncing that. I apologize. I haven't had a chance to get in touch with you before recording this to confirm your pronunciation. But hey man, welcome aboard and thank you again. And I can't underline this point enough. There is literally no show without you. So for those of you do help support, please pat yourself on the back and of course, as always, everyone can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, where you can fire me an email to Doomsday pod at gmail dot com. Oh and if you're on TikTok, I know it's probably been about two years, but I just finally got my password back, so so you can check that out at Doomsday dot the Dot podcast on TikTok. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. And I wanted to thank everyone leaving reviews on Spotify. Sorry it takes me so long to see them. I always thank all my Patreon listeners, new and old, for their support and encouragement. But I also say, if you can spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. Through often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot Ca. On the next episode. Looking back at our episodes this year, we have seen an awful lot of fire, so I don't know, maybe we could take a minute to cool off in the greatest floodwaters to ever cover the American landscape. Maybe we could take a minute to cool off in the gentle lapping waters of the greatest flood to ever cross the American landscape. It's the Great Johnstown Flood of eighteen eighty nine. We'll talk soon. Safety Gog goes off, and thanks for listening.