Doctors Finished Open Heart Surgery While Hospital Was On Fire

2eA group of doctors stayed behind while the rest of the hospital worked towards evacuation after a fire broke out.

It took firefighters almost two hours to put out the flames that started on the roof of the hospital in Blagoveshchensk. Meanwhile, they used fans to keep smoke out of an operating room, and ran a power cable from another location to keep it supplied with enough electricity.

A group of eight doctors and nurses finished the open heart operation on the patient in those two hours, before they were able to move them to another site.

"There's nothing else we could do. We had to save the person. We did everything at the highest level," surgeon Valentin Filatov told REN TV about the heart by-pass operation.

The ministry said 128 people evacuated from the hospital as the flames overtook the roof.

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"The clinic was built more than a century ago, in 1907, and the fire spread like lightning through the wooden ceilings of the roof," the emergency ministry said.

No injuries were reported.

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