Almaty cafe explosion leaves 18 injured

    By Tatyana Kuzmina and Dinara Urazova
    An explosion in a cafe in Almaty has left 18 people injured. The Keremet café is located on the first floor of the Partner Business Center on Makatayev Street, a Tengrinews correspondent reports.
    The explosion was strong enough that it injured people standing in the street outside the café. It overturned all the furniture inside, the cafe's kitchen and dented a gate made of thick iron bars. No fire ensued however... and the blast left the propane cylinders stored outside the building undamaged.
    Deputy Chief of the local fire department Oleg Messerschmidt said visitors, workers and several passers-by were hit by the blast, but none were seriously injured. They were taken to four different hospitals.
    The explosion happened at 9:52 p.m. on September 17. The fire department arrived at the scene with four vehicles and 32 firefighters. Messerschmidt said that preliminary data suggest a gas leak caused an explosion in the kitchen.
    An eyewitness said the cafe staff had smelled gas and asked visitors to leave immediately. However, the explosion hit as the people were approaching the door.
    There are no gas supply pipes in the building, which wa why the cafe was using bottle propane for cooking. Both the building and the cafe held valid fire safety regulation compliance certificates.
    The exact cause of the explosion is being investigated, Messerschmidt noted. “Major damages have been inflicted on window openings and the interior partitions. Most likely this is related to the gas. But this a preliminary conclusion. This is being investigated by competent authorities at the moment,” he said.
    According to the Kazakhstan’s technical standards, gas cylinders should be kept outside. Some of them were, but not all.
    Propane gas cylinders do not explode easily and nor do they explode on their own. Propane cylinders generally do not explode if they are used and stored according to accepted standards.
    Gas cylinder fires or explosions are usually caused by leaking gas escaping from a faulty appliance.
    Most leaks are too small for sufficient gas to accumulat in the room to cause an explosion. A special smelly substance is added to the gas so people will notice the leak in time.
    A large amount of gas must collect in a room or section of a structure before it can explode. Such explosions usually also cause a fire or can be provoked by a fire.
    There are no signs of fire in the cafe's kitchen. Can there be a propane explosion without a fire?
    The furniture was also scattered in the kitchen after the explosion, pushed away from the window toward the rear wall. Officials are now investigating how an explosion inside the kitchen could have caused this. The metal fence was also dented inward, according to Tengrinews.kz.