ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia — A fire swept through a nursing home in southern Russia today and killed 62 people, a toll authorities said was inflated by safety violations, negligence and the long distance from the nearest firehouse.

A night watchman ignored two fire alarms before reporting the blaze, and it took firefighters nearly an hour to get to the nursing home in the Azov Sea coast region village of Kamyshevatskaya, where the fire station was closed last year, emergency officials said.

Many of the nursing home's elderly residents could not escape on their own and some knocked on windows seeking aid, according to news reports and a local resident who said he helped evacuate people from the two-story brick building.

Russian television networks showed footage of the building's blackened exterior walls, charred wheelchairs and a first-floor room that was gutted and covered in ash.

In addition to the dead, 35 were injured, regional emergency official Sergei Petrov said, adding that there were 97 people in the building when the fire broke out, including four employees. Acting Krasnodar regional governor Murat Akhedzhak said 30 people were hospitalized and that their lives were not in danger.

The fire occurred less than 24 hours after a methane gas explosion at a Siberian coal mine killed more than 100 people in Russia's deadliest mining disaster in a decade.

Firefighters were alerted to the blaze shortly after 1 a.m. and headed for the scene from Yeisk, a town on the other side of a peninsula, arriving nearly an hour later and extinguishing the fire by about 5 a.m., Petrov said.