MOSCOW. Nov 9 (Interfax-AVN) - As many as 10,087 people have been affected by emergency situations and over 790 of them died this year, Deputy Emergencies Minister Mikhail Faleyev said on Friday.
A total of 644 breakdowns and catastrophes of local territorial and federal scale have occurred in Russia in the period under consideration, Faleyev told Interfax-Military News Agency. The figure is 17 percent lower than that of the same period in 2000. Man-made disasters have killed 706 and injured 2,105 Russian citizens.
The growing number of plane crashes is of special concern, the deputy minister stressed. It went up from 16 last year to 27 this year. A total of 211 people died in the crashes, the most serious of them being the TU-154 Careless plane disaster near Irkutsk, which killed 145 people. The majority of crashes were caused by equipment breakdowns and mistakes of ground control services.
Russia has registered 20 train and vessel disasters killing five and more people each. There have also been 42 car accidents resulting in a similar number of victims. Thirteen terrorist acts committed in the North Caucasus killed 42 people.