8 Tons of TNT Explode at Soviet Far East Base

Eight tons of TNT exploded at an anti-aircraft base near the Soviet Union’s far eastern city of Khabarovsk, smashing windows in almost 200 homes and injuring some people, the newspaper Izvestia said Saturday.

“There were no deaths, but there are injuries. Basically, people received cuts from glass broken out of window frames by the force of the blast,” Sergei F. Akhromeyev, the chief of the Soviet military staff, told the official government newspaper.

Izvestia said the explosion took place late Friday evening at an anti-aircraft base five miles south of Khabarovsk, a city of about 600,000 people located just north of the Chinese border.

Windows were shattered in almost 200 homes in an outlying area of the city. A poultry-processing factory, two hospitals, 38 stores and several schools and kindergartens also were damaged, the newspaper said.

The Soviet military was helping repair the damage, and a special commission was appointed to investigate the blast, the paper said.

Friday’s explosion follows two others involving even larger amounts of explosives in the past two months.

On May 12, an accident blamed on careless handling of explosives at a factory in Pavlograd, in the Ukraine, that manufactures fuel for nuclear missiles killed three workers and seriously injured five others. Twelve tons of explosives detonated.

On June 4, there was a more devastating accident--an explosion that occurred as a train carrying 120 tons of explosives rolled into the Arzamas railway station, 250 miles east of Moscow.

The still-unexplained explosion flattened a wide area around the city. The death toll quickly approached 100, with the figures published the next week reporting 83 confirmed dead, 11 missing and presumed dead and 228 people still hospitalized.

The blast destroyed 150 houses and damaged another 250. Emergency housing had to be provided for 700 families. The crater where the three freight cars had been was 85 feet deep and 175 feet across.