Fire in Grozny City tower put out, no casualties reported

The fire in a Grozny City tower under construction is put out fully, head of the press service of the North Caucasus regional emergency situation centre Kantemir Davydov told Itar-Tass on Thursday. “The fire was reported to be extinguished at 01:30 Moscow time on Thursday,” he said. No casualties were reported in the fire. Thus, the firemen needed a little bit more than seven hours to put out the fire that engulfed on 18,000 square metres of a 145-metre-high skyscraper. The fire alarm call came at 18:15 Moscow time on Tuesday about the fire in the Grozny City tower. The detectives from the EMERCOM fire watchdog have already opened a criminal case under an article of the Russian Criminal Code for violation of the fire safety rules. According to a version, the fire broke out due to a short circuit in the air conditioner on the upper floors of the building and the fire has spread sweepingly on the insulating plates of the facade of the building, though the lower floors were saved from the fire. The firemen also protected the neighboring buildings from the fire, including the hotel, where a flat belonging to French actor Gerard Depardieu is located. Deputy Minister of Emergency Situations Alexander Chupriyan noted that the fire-fighting efforts are complicated by the fact that the fire equipment can reach the 20th floor at most of the 40-storey high-rise building. “As a high-rise building is not commissioned, automatic fire-fighting devices do not function, the lack of indoor and outdoor fire-fighting water supplies results in the fact that the fire had spread on a large area,” Chupriyan said before. However, the firemen succeeded to extinguish the fire with the assistance of the helicopter, which arrived from Mineralnye Vody. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said in his Instagram photo blog, where he posted the photos from the fire site, that all the emergency services were involved in the fire-fighting. Meanwhile, he noted that “by the dinner on Thursday we will decide how the burnt building will look like…” “By the way, the hotel works in the routine mode, neighboring buildings are not damaged and their dwellers are calm,” Kadyrov wrote down. The compound of skyscrapers in Grozny is situated in the centre of the city on the bank of the Sunzha River. The Grozny City occupies the area of 4.5 hectares and includes three skyscrapers: one 45-storey high-rise building, two 30-storey high-rise buildings. Meanwhile, the compound includes two 18-storey residential houses, a five star high-rise hotel, a business centre with the helipad and a two-level underground parking.