Yevgeny still cannot understand it. It was his first day of work at a small metal dealer in the Siberian town of Borowskij, right after the Christian Orthodox Christmas in Russia. No sooner had he got to work than he saw dark billows of smoke rising from the courtyard opposite. “We went over with other colleagues and neighbors right away, the house owner was already outside and said there were two elderly women in the house whom we saved through the window,” the Russian reported to a local newspaper a few days later. “If she had said that there were more people in there, we could have saved her too”.
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The fire, which started as a minor incident on January 9, ended up shaking all of Russia. The advancing rescue workers later found seven dead in the disaster house. Three men and four women between the ages of 63 and 81 suffocated on the smoke gases while the unsuspecting firefighters extinguished the burning utility buildings in the courtyard. Another eyewitness and an employee of the rescue service later confirmed that the homeowner Olga Wiljamson had assured that her house was empty.
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Wiljamson is now in custody, while the authorities are investigating terrible suspicions. The Russian had apparently operated a private old people’s home in her home, without an official license or state registration. This is also confirmed by relatives of the victims, who paid the operator the equivalent of just under 350 euros a month for their relatives’ accommodation. “Any other explanation, besides the fear of being exposed, can hardly be found for her actions during the fire,” wrote the state-run Rossiyskaya Gazette a few days ago.
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A series of misfortunes
The case caused a sensation at the highest level in Russia. The head of the Federal Investigation Committee Alexander Bastrykin promised to personally oversee the investigation. The governor of the affected Tyumen region made a similar statement and promised to “hold the guilty to account”.
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But while the authorities are now promising a quick clarification, the recent fire shines the spotlight on a whole series of accidents that have occurred in similar facilities. It was not until December 2020 that a retirement home burned down in a village in Bashkiria. At that time, eleven seniors between the ages of 57 and 80 died. In May 2020 a short circuit in an ailing line started a fire in a home in Krasnogorsk near Moscow. At that time nine people died and nine more were hospitalized. In April of the same year, a defective boiler caused a fire in a senior citizen’s home in Moscow. Five people, some of whom were bedridden, died.
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What these cases have in common is not just that the victims were elderly people in need of help. Rather, they are all smaller private institutions that have provided their services without a license and without state registrations. In the vast majority of cases, the authorities only learn of the existence of such institutions when accidents occur. This in turn means that fire protection, sanitary and hygienic standards can only be checked in the rarest of cases. It was similar in the case of the burned down old people’s home in Borovsky, Siberia. “At the current time, the building was registered as a private residence,” says the local administration. The tragedy was a shock for everyone. This also corresponds to the information from the federal real estate register Rosrejestr.
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According to Alexej Sidnew, head of the private senior citizens’ home chain Senior Group, there could be up to 600 such semi-legal facilities in the Moscow area alone. There could be up to 30,000 beds across the country. In fact, it is difficult to estimate the exact number. The Moscow authorities have now recognized that the problem has a system. “Recently, fires in private old people’s homes have increased,” said Anatoly Suprunovsky, Vice Minister for Disaster Control, a few days ago. “Often there is no consideration of fire protection regulations”. Missing fire alarms, untrained and negligent staff, rooms in which the residents often live in twos or threes are only part of the problem.
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Unsustainable conditions, hardly any controls
For industry experts, the cause is obvious. “There is no mandatory licensing procedure for private retirement homes. Registration is voluntary,” explains Elizaweta Oleskina, head of the “Age of Happiness” foundation. “You don’t have to let anyone know if you rent a house, hire a cook and a few nurses and advertise on the Internet,” explains Oleskina. A simple business registration as a hostel is sufficient, but here too the penalties for missing registration are no higher than the equivalent of 60 euros. Such facilities are therefore as good as invisible to the authorities, which is why there are hardly any checks.
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This not infrequently leads to untenable conditions in such facilities. The last major scandal was only a year ago. At that time, the public prosecutor’s office in the Chelyabinsk region was investigating a private old people’s home, all of whose 54 residents had to be hospitalized. According to the authorities, they were immobilized with medication for months while the living quarters were full of dirt and bugs.
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But not only the lack of controls is a problem, but also the lack of state-licensed, affordable facilities. According to the expert Sidnew, the costs for a place in a nursing home add up to the equivalent of 1,000 to 1,300 euros per month according to all applicable standards. That is an immense sum even for wealthy Moscow. The average pension in the Russian capital is around 300 euros a month. In the cheapest private institutions, however, the prices start at 350 euros a month. According to the Russian association “World of the Older Generation”, the country currently needs at least 630,000 places in old people’s homes, while there are only 280,000 places in state and licensed private institutions on the market.
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The latest fire in the Siberian town of Borovsky could at least finally bring important changes to the law in motion. The first demands for mandatory registration and licensing of private senior citizens’ institutions have already been made in the Russian Federation Council, writes the official newspaper of the Russian parliament, “Parlamentkaja Gazeta”. A change in the law is now being discussed.
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