The number and the total area of forest fires in Russia are decreasing

Monday, August 19, 2019

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The number and the total area of forest fires in Russia are decreasing, the Russian Emergencies Ministry’s information department told Itar-Tass on Friday. A total of 106 fire outbreaks over more than 4,000 hectares were reported as of Friday morning. The day before, 124 fires on 5,700 hectares were reported. There are large fires in Tuva, Buryatia, Yakutia and the Amur, Nizhny Novgorod and Ryazan regions at present. At the same time, in the Central Region, 27 outbreaks over almost 200 hectares were reported in the Vladimir and Ryazan regions on Friday, 83 hectares more than the day before. Nineteen mobile teams of the Russian Emergencies Ministry and the ministry's Il-76 air tanker and two helicopters are fighting the blazes in the regions. According to the ministry, the fires do not pose a threat to residential areas. The head of the ministry's department in the Central Region, Vladimir Stepanov, told reporters on Friday that the total area of forest and peat fires was reduced in half to 26.7 hectares in the Vladimir Region. Teams of firemen from Tula and Noginsk helped to improve the situation in a day, he said. Firemen by joint efforts managed to put out the peat fire that had spread over more than three hectares near the town of Kurlovo. However, the head of the Vladimir regional department for emergencies, Sergei Mameyev, said the Meshchera national park was still faced with the threat from eight peat fires. A blaze breaks out at a depth of several metres, and so it is not visible, he noted. The region's Governor Nikolai Vinogradov has allocated over one million roubles from a reserve fund to provide fuel for new powerful firefighting machines. He also called on district heads to fight fires more actively without counting on help from elsewhere. Since the beginning of the fire-threat period, 12,872 fires have raged over a total of almost 986,000 hectares in Russia.

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