Downtown Moscow Blaze

1. Firefighters struggled all day Thursday, February 12, 1998 to extinguish a stubborn blaze that erupted in a seven-storey downtown office building. Officials worried that tons of water used to fight the fire might freeze and bring down the entire structure.

2. City police considers this fire to be the city's biggest fire in recent memory: 41 people were injured, 33 of them firefighters.

3. The blaze, which appeared to be under control in the evening of the same day gutted the Russian Sea Fleet building, Rozhdestvenskaya Street, about midway be­tween the Bolshoi Theatre and Lubyanskaya Square.

4. More than 100 people were evacuated from the Sea Fleet building after the fire broke out at around 4:30 p.m. Many were treated at the scene for smoke inhalation. Apolice spokesman said that three civilian women and nine firefighters had been hospitalized by late Thursday, mostly for burns or smoke inhalation.

5. The building houses the offices of the Sea Fleet. There was no immediate damage estimate.

6. “Temperatures there, especially inside of the walls and floors, are still very high, - said spokesman for the Moscow Fire Department. Today firefighters were knocking down the walls to make sure that fire is put out”.

7. The building's four upper floors were gutted. While upper floors of the nearly century-old building continued to smoulder late Thursday, small groups of Sea Fleet administration employees were allowed to venture into the lower floors in search of personal belongings.

8. Officials saved the Russian flag and carried it carefully from the building. Officials said that the biggest losses were archives, data bases and the communication centre that manages links between all Russian seaports and the merchant fleet.