Last summer there was a fire on the territory of Surmalu shopping center, the head of the Armenian Ministry of Emergency Situations Armen Pambukhchyan stated this during an online press conference.
According to him, there were no other signals of impending tragedy.
Speaking about the coordinated work of rescuers, the Minister noted that despite the scale of work, unprecedented for the Ministry, the fire was localized in 49 hours and extinguished in 53 hours. In 44 hours 16 bodies were pulled out from the rubble. In two hours 10 citizens were rescued.
To answer the question of whether 4 tons of pyrotechnic products were really stored in the warehouse of the shopping center, and whether it was possible to store such a quantity of explosive products in the shopping center, the minister left it to the investigation. "We knew the warehouse was on fire, and it was within our authority to find out what was there. There were different numbers. But there was data that we were talking about about four tons of pyrotechnics. But that's a preliminary figure. We said "approximately," but we did not give any unambiguous data. The final data will be given by the investigation. We needed the data to understand whether there might be another explosion or not," said the minister, adding that, judging by the images on video footage, about a minute had passed between the ignition and the explosion.
According to him, there were no problems with either equipment or training of personnel when extinguishing the fire. The fire was extinguished by 32 fire trucks, 13 units of special equipment, UAV, canine service. "Our specialists were retrained in the USA and under the quota they are trained in the Russian Federation, retraining programs are regularly held," emphasized Pambukhchyan. He reminded that recently the government allotted 1 billion 200 million for purchasing special equipment and repairing fire brigades' buildings. Now the Ministry of Emergency Situations is equipped with equipment donated or received under programs from Japan, Russia, France and other countries.
