Terrifying moment: Desperate parents throw their children out of apartment block windows and jump to escape fire raging inside a 16th-floor residential building in Kazakhstan
- 31 people were taken to hospital after a fire swept through a tower
Terrifying footage shows residents of a burning apartment block in Kazakhstan throwing their children out of windows for the people below to catch.
The fire devastated the 16-story residential building in Almaty, the country’s largest city, after cables caught fire in an elevator shaft between the fifth and sixth floors.
Some 300 people were evacuated from the burning building today, but some on the upper floors were thrown out or jumped as inferno engulfed the block.
The footage shows gruesome images of youngsters falling from windows to be caught on mattresses and sheets by those on the floor.
A young resident was also seen climbing from a top-story window onto a platform raised about 170 feet above the ground from a crane.
A young man is seen falling from a height as an inferno rages through the tower.
Another person falls from a height while people on the ground wait with a mattress.
Footage shows a woman jumping out of a window to escape the fire at a skyscraper in Almaty
It is not clear how many were thrown or jumped from the building.
Reports said that the emergency stairs could not be used because the residents had blocked them.
Some 31 people were taken to city hospitals, including 16 children.
Initial reports said there were no fatalities.
High rescue ladders were later brought in by the fire services to reach the upper floors of the building, lowering 40 people safely to the ground.
Residents were filmed climbing out of windows and dangerously down the stairs, before climbing onto separate extended ladders to reach the ground.
Video still showed smoke billowing from the building as residents tried to escape.
The fire was eventually extinguished with 50 firefighters and three ladders.
The emergency services issued a statement after the incident: ‘On August 1, at 17:10, the Emergency Department forces were dispatched to the Alatau district.
“Upon arrival, six minutes later, an apartment on the fifth floor of a 16-story residential building was found to be burning with an open flame.”
They said it took about an hour and a half to put out the fire.
It took firefighters around an hour and a half to extinguish the fire today.
A man climbs out of a window and starts down a ladder as flames engulf the building.
In May 2022, video captured the moment a 37-year-old hero rescued a three-year-old girl who was hanging from a Kazakh tower window.
Sabit Shontakbaev, 37, was on his way to work with a friend when he saw a crowd below looking at the three-year-old.
Her mother had gone shopping and left her home in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, alone when she piled her toys and cushions to climb out the window.
Sabit, a father of four, immediately ran upstairs in an attempt to save her before she fell to her death.
He ran inside the block and went up to the seventh floor, to the floor immediately below where the girl was hanging precariously.
“We knocked and luckily they opened the door for us right away,” he said.
He climbed out the window under the terrified girl who by then had been holding out for 15 minutes.
