A high-voltage cable at a central station of Okhotny Ryad of the Moscow metro (the station is located on the Red Line) caught fire on Wednesday morning. As many as 1,500 people were evacuated from the station because of the heavy smoke that filled the station. Forty-five people suffered as a result of the incident, seven of them were hospitalized, officials said. Most people asked for medical help due to carbon monoxide poisoning.
The incident occurred at 8:20 a.m. The fire was liquidated at 9:04 a.m., but the traffic on the Red Line from Park Kultury to Komsomolskaya stations had to be interrupted. The Moscow metro will resume normal work in a few hours, officials said.
A cable caught fire in the passage between Okhotny Ryad and Biblioteka Imeni Lenina stations. Three highly busy stations of the Red Line - Komsomolskaya (the station to reach three major railway stations), Okhotny Ryad (the station to reach Moscow's Red Square) and Lubyanka - were closed for entrance because of the smoke.
As a result, hundreds of passengers filled the Komsomolskaya station soon after the incident. The passages between the radial and the ring lines were filled with people instantly. Some people left the metro and tried to catch taxi cabs to get to work. The incident immediately resulted in skyrocketing prices on taxi rides.
As many as 45 people, including two children, were injured as a result of the incident. Seven people were hospitalized: a 47-year-old man, two women aged 27 and 28 and a 15-year-old girl. All of them are in stable condition. Three other patients were rushed to the Sklifosovsky Institute of Emergency Medicine.