Amid a record heat wave and drought, fires in a great portion of eastern Russia are burning out of control. The death toll from Russian fires was 48 as of Aug. 6 and entire villages have been consumed by flames. A thick blanket of smoke suffocated Moscow residents and 4,000 people are burnt out of their homes. In certain areas, nuclear contamination from the Chernobyl disaster locked up in the trees might be re-released by the fires. The Russian government has come under rare public criticism for being slow and ill-outfitted to fight the fires.
Raging fires only the latest disaster for Russia
More than 1.6 million acres in Russia have burnt since the fires started, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said. The government has called upon more than 155,000 Russians to fight the fires. The Wall Street Journal reports that in a 24-hour period more than 403 new forest fires sparked when 293 were put out. A total of 520 fires were blazing across Russia on Aug. 6. The record Russian heat wave that started the fires-as well as the Russia’s worst drought in at least 3 decades-shows no sign of letting up. Searing heat will persist, with some parts of the country reaching up to 107 degrees, until at least Aug. 12.
Russian government on the hot seat
As the Russian government fights to get the fires under control, public anger is boiling over. The government’s inability to protect its citizens from both natural and man-made disasters has been brought out in the open, the Financial Times said. 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. Nikolay Petrov of the Carnegie Moscow Centre told the Times that the death toll is much higher in Russia than in other countries where such fires occur as 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
Concerns about nuclear contamination are being raised as Russia burns. AFP reports that radioactive cesium 137 from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster is locked up within the trees and dead leaves in forests in certain areas of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. If trees in those areas burn, Philippe Renaud, head of the environmental radiation laboratory at France’s IRSN nuclear safety institute, said the Russian nuclear contamination would be released to the air where it could possibly be a respiratory hazard as far away as France.
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