Aug. 9 (UPI) — At least 52 people were injured Wednesday morning in a blast at a fireworks factory in an industrial park outside Moscow, authorities said.
The Moscow Regional Health Ministry reported that 23 ambulance crews, five teams of the territorial Center for Emergency Medicine and a medevac helicopter were all working at the plant in Sergiyev Posad, 46 miles northeast of the capital.
“Currently, six people are in intensive care, 17 have been hospitalized and 22 are at an outpatient trauma clinic,” its statement said. It is noted that 40 additional beds have been prepared at a local hospital.
At least five of the injured sustained 100% burns to their bodies in the blast at the Zagorsk Optical-Mechanical Plant, which was so powerful that it damaged houses and buildings on two neighboring streets, 20 apartment towers, two schools and a sports complex.
The Ministry of Health said three people removed from the rubble were in serious condition and Moscow Regional Gov. Andrey Vorobyov said as many as five people may still be trapped under debris.
Authorities were quick to attribute the incident, which occurred at 10:40 a.m., to human error, citing “technological failure.”
“The blast was caused by a violation of technological processes,” Russian state-run news agency TASS quoted the chair of the State Duma Construction, Housing and Communal Services Committee, Sergey Pakhomov, as saying.
He said that all workers at the site were being evacuated.
Investigators are reported to have already filed criminal charges over violations of industrial safety regulations.
The blast came after Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced the city’s air defenses downed two attack drones in a brief statement published to Telegram, stating one targeted the Domodedovo region of the city and the other flew over the M1 highway, a major thoroughfare that runs through the city to the Belarusian border.
“At the moment, there is no information about the victims from the fall of the wreckage,” he said. “Emergency services are on site.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the attack failed while blaming Ukraine for targeting facilities in Moscow with unmanned aerial vehicles.
“An attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out a terrorist attack by unmanned aerial vehicles over the territory of the Moscow Region was thwarted during the night. Two drones were shot down by air defense systems,” the ministry said in a report carried by TASS.
Moscow has been left mostly unscathed by the 18-month war, but it has become a target of Ukraine in the past few weeks.
Kyiv’s first strike on the city appears to have been in late May when a handful of drones were launched at the Russian capital but were thwarted.
Since then, there have been several strikes on the city.
Late last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned the Kremlin that it would start to feel the costs of war at home.
“Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centers and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process,” he said.
