FEB. 17 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — An avalanche killed seven Kazakh soldiers on a military exercise in mountains in the southwest of the country, media reported quoting the country’s emergency ministry. It also said that 16 more soldiers had been rescued from the avalanche.
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(News report from Issue No. 317, published on Feb.17 2017)
JAN. 30 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A fire in Tbilisi destroyed the Children’s World and Gold Market shopping centre. Reports said that 31 fire-fighting units tackled the blaze, one of the biggest in Tbilisi. The shopping mall covered an area roughly the size of two football pitches. It is still unclear what caused the fire.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
FEB. 1 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Reports have appeared in Kyrgyz media that a cargo plane which crashed into a village next to Manas airport last month was carrying iphones and other electronic equipment in a smuggling operation based at the airport. Eyewitnesses also told the RFE/RL website that some of the first members of the emergency services looted the crash site. “One policeman took off his shirt and filled it with mobile phones,” RFE/RL quoted a young boy as saying.
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
FEB. 1 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Two Soviet-era Mi-24 military helicopters crewed by Georgians and Belarusians collided on the border of Rwanda and Uganda, media reported. The Georgian ministry of defence said that the Georgian crew were working privately and were not employees of the Georgian military. It’s unclear how serious the crews’ injuries are. The incident does highlight the use of contractors from Georgia and other parts of the former Soviet Union who were trained to fly Soviet planes and helicopters.
FEB. 3 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) —
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(News report from Issue No. 315, published on Feb. 3 2017)
BISHKEK, JAN. 16 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — A Turkish cargo aeroplane flying from Hong Kong to Istanbul overshot the runway at Manas International Airport outside Bishkek on a refuelling stop, ploughed into a village and killed at least 38 people.
Crash investigators said fog had shrouded the airport but there had been no problems reported from the flight deck.
Airports in Central Asia are competing for lucrative stop-over trade for flights, both passenger and cargo, between East Asia and Europe. Depending on the investigators’ findings, the crash may damage Manas’ credibility.
At the crash site, the village of Dacha-Suu, which took the main impact, had been destroyed. The aeroplane’s torn wing stuck up through a smashed roof. The cockpit lay smashed and broken in a front garden. Part of the undercarriage had ripped through a living room, bringing death and destruction to Kyrgyz domestic tranquility.
Residents of the village who escaped described a loud bang.
“I thought there was an earthquake, but looking out of the window, we saw the fire,” one man told television news.
A Conway Bulletin correspondent said that the military and the police had cordoned off the site.
There has also been criticism of the government’s response with many Kyrgyz saying that President Almazbek Atambayev was too slow to show his grief over what is being treated as a national disaster.
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(News report from Issue No. 313, published on Jan. 20 2017)
JAN. 2 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — At least nine people died when an apartment building in the town of Shakhan, near Karaganda in central Kazakhstan, collapsed. The emergency services have said that the death toll could rise. The accident shows the often dangerous state of many of the Soviet-era buildings in Kazakhstan.
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(News report from Issue No. 311, published on Jan. 6 2017)
DEC. 16 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Heavy snowfall has partially blocked the main highway from Russia into Georgia. The highway crosses the Caucasus Mountains and is the main route into and out of Georgia. Media reported that lorries and vans have been banned from driving along the S-3 road from Mtskheta and Lars. A landslide blocked the road in June for three weeks, causing product shortages in Georgia and Armenia, which also depends on it for supplies.
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(News report from Issue No. 310, published on Dec. 23 2016)
DEC. 15 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Nine oil workers were missing after an oil rig partially collapsed during a storm in the Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea that killed at least one person, Azerbaijan’s state energy company SOCAR said.
The collapse came almost exactly a year after a fire on two Azerbaijani oil platforms killed 30 oil workers in the worst offshore accident in the energy sector since 167 people died in the Piper Alpha fire in the North Sea in 1988.
The latest accident will embarrass SOCAR and Azerbaijan’s oil sector because it had promised to improve safety after the deaths in 2015.
Much of the infrastructure that SOCAR uses in the Caspian Sea is decades old and Azerbaijan has been heavily criticised for not updating and modernising its structures.
The oil industry is also vital to the Azerbaijani economy. It has been under pressure to maintain oil output despite the aging infrastructure and aging fields.
SOCAR officials said that emergency services are still looking for the nine missing oil workers.
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(News report from Issue No. 309, published on Dec. 16 2016)
NOV. 19 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — Seven migrant workers from Tajikistan died in a fire in the metal container they were using as their living quarters on a construction site in Siberia, media reported.
Investigators said that the cause was likely to be a short-circuit in the electric heater which was warming the container. The container had been lined with wood and felt to keep out the severe cold.
This is the third major accident involving migrant workers this year. In January a roof collapsed onto a sewing workshop in Moscow, killing at least 12 migrant workers and in September a fire in a printing workshop killed at least 16 women workers from Kyrgyzstan.
Remittances from Russia is a vital source of income for countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus, especially for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
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(News report from Issue No. 306, published on Nov. 25 2016)
NOV. 6 2016 (The Conway Bulletin) — A fire in a residential building near the Almaty Towers complex killed seven people, mostly Kazakh university students. Investigators said that the likely causes of the fire were either a fault during ongoing construction works or an electrical short-circuit. One welder and six students died in the accident. The Almaty Towers complex is located near the circus in the western part of the city.
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(News report from Issue No. 304, published on Nov. 11 2016)