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A resident died in a fire that broke out shortly after midnight on 24 October in a multi-storey apartment building in Tashkent’s Uchtepa district, and emergency crews were forced to leave their vehicle and run to the scene after illegally parked cars blocked the road leading to the building.
Tashkent City Emergency Situations Department spokesman Zuhriddin Qurbonov confirmed to Qalampir.uz that responders did struggle to reach the site and that haphazardly parked vehicles were the cause of the delay. Despite the obstruction, he said, rescuers got out of their truck and ran the remaining distance on foot. Witness footage circulating online shows firefighters sprinting toward the building.
According to official data, the department received the call at 01:33 and crews extinguished the fire by 01:52 — a nineteen-minute response window that included the time lost to the blocked road. The blaze damaged household furnishings inside the apartment. One body was found at the scene. A criminal case has been opened and a pre-trial investigation is under way to establish the cause and other details.
A parking gap written into law
Witnesses told the outlet that the residential complex has no dedicated parking of its own. A paid car park nearby sits largely empty, they said, so residents leave vehicles wherever space allows — including on the access roads fire trucks need.
Open-source information identifies the building as House 13 in the Orikzor Residence complex on Yusuf Sakkokiy Street, constructed by Land House LLC, which was registered on 12 June 2018.
The incident exposes a structural gap in Uzbekistan’s legislation. The country’s Urban Planning Code does not require developers of multi-storey residential buildings to provide parking alongside them. Two separate government programme drafts — one targeting 2023 and another targeting 2025 — proposed making underground and above-ground parking mandatory for new residential, commercial and social facilities, and the 2025 draft specifically called for a regulatory document on underground parking to be prepared by September 2025. Neither led to amendments to the Urban Planning Code.
One ministerial order does address the immediate safety issue. An April 2024 order by the Minister of Construction and Housing and Communal Services on rules for the maintenance and use of multi-storey buildings explicitly prohibits parking vehicles opposite entrances or in any position that obstructs access — with an exemption for fire engines, ambulances and other emergency vehicles while on duty. That order was in force on the night of the fire, but the parked cars were there regardless.
The combination of a legal vacuum on developer obligations and weak enforcement of the existing parking ban left the access road blocked when it mattered most.