It became known why a family from the Sverdlovsk region suffocated in the basement.

      The Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case under the article "Causing death by negligence" after the tragedy in the village of Bulanash in the Sverdlovsk region, where three people died.

      According to the investigation, on the evening of July 12, a 35-year-old kindergarten teacher, Elena Kasatkina, died at a private house on Repina Street. That day, the woman came to visit her parents with her two daughters.

      As her husband Artem told "KP-Ekaterinburg," he learned about the incident from the children. Unable to reach either his wife or his father-in-law by phone, the man contacted one of his daughters.

      — "I called my daughter, and she was crying and said, 'Dad, they are not breathing,'" Artem recalls.

      The man immediately went to his wife's parents' house with a friend. He had previously worked as a firefighter for over ten years, so he understood how dangerous it was to descend into confined spaces alone.

      According to him, the cause of the tragedy could have been the accumulation of methane in the cellar, which had never happened before. Artem believes that the gas could have appeared after the floods when methane began to escape from old mines.

      Preliminary data suggests that Elena was the first to descend into the cellar and almost immediately lost consciousness. Following her was her father Viktor, who tried to pull his daughter out but also lost consciousness. Then Elena's mother Irina descended into the cellar, who also could not get out.

      As reported by Valery Gorelykh, head of the press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Sverdlovsk region, the family had prepared a batch of canned cucumbers from the fresh harvest and intended to store them in the cellar.