Amid a record heat wave and drought, fires in a great portion of eastern Russia are burning out of control. Entire villages are ruined by the flames and as of Aug. 6 the death toll was 48. Moscow was suffocating under a toxic blanket of smoke and 4,000 people have lost their houses. In certain areas, nuclear contamination from the Chernobyl disaster locked up within the trees could be re-released by the fires. The Russian government has come under rare public criticism for being slow and ill-equipped to fight the fires.
Russian fires add to summer of disaster
Russian fires have burned more than 1.6 million acres of land since they began, as outlined by the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry. The government has called upon more than 155,000 Russians to fight the fires. The Wall Street Journal reports that more than 400 new fires emerged even as 293 were put out. Across Russia as of Aug. 6, at least 520 fires were burning. Russia’s worst drought in 30 years and a record heat wave that lead to the fires won’t end anytime soon. At least until Aug. 12, scorching temperatures will continue, with some areas hitting up to 107 degrees.
Russian government feels the heat
Russian fires have also ignited public anger as the government struggles to get the disaster under control. The latest disaster has underscored the inability of the government to protect Russians from such calamities, as outlined by the Financial Times. Despite soaring energy revenues that have transformed it into a country with a trillion-dollar plus economy, Russia still suffers from flawed governance, a slapdash approach to safety and a dilapidated infrastructure. The lives lost are much higher in Russia than in other countries where such fires occur, Nikolay Petrov of the Carnegie Moscow Centre told the Times, because the system is “absolutely dysfunctional”. Petrov said that under the “super-centralized” political apparatus installed by Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, communication was far too slow to be effective.
Europeans threaten by nuclear contamination from fires
Nuclear contamination is another threat posed by Russian fires. AFP reports that in certain areas of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, radioactive cesium 137 left over from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster remains within the forests. Philippe Renaud, head of the environmental radiation laboratory at France’s IRSN nuclear safety institute, said If trees in those areas burn, the Russian nuclear contamination would be released to the air where it might be breathed in by people as far away as France.
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