Fires flare up as Russia pledges better forest protection

Fresh fires destroyed more than 400 houses in the Siberian region of Altai, officials said, as flames spread across the region's border with the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan.

“The village of Nikolayevka has been entirely taken by the flames. According to preliminary information, 433 houses burned down,” emergency ministry spokeswoman Irina Andryanova was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

All 1,000 residents of the village were safely evacuated, the spokeswoman said.

An evacuation was underway in the village of Bastan, where flames had already destroyed four houses, she said.

“Three fires from Kazakhstan are heading towards the regions of Altai and Novosibirsk,” RIA Novosti quoted a local emegency official in Altai as saying.

Authorities were sending fire-fighting aircraft — two planes and four helicopters — to help extinguish the flames, which at one stage were covering 11 kilometers (seven miles) in a single hour, emergencies ministry spokeswoman Olesya Kukuyeva told AFP.

One person died trying to put out the fire in Kazakhstan's Pavlodar region, an official with the country's emergencies ministry told AFP.

The fresh fire outbreak comes after Russia battled hundreds of blazes earlier this year, some dangerously close to its top nuclear research centre in Sarov.

Environmentalists last month accused the authorities of intentionally under-reporting the scale of the disaster, saying the fires had cost the country US$300 billion, citing estimates based on the market value of timber and the cost of reforestation.

Environmental groups including WWF and Greenpeace said the fires wreaked damage on such a colossal scale due to forestry legislation and reforms passed since the start of Vladimir Putin's 2000-2008 presidency when he introduced a new Forest Code.

Those reforms turned Russia's prized forests into a virtual no-man's land, environmentalists said, as they led to the sacking of some 150,000 forestry officials, including forest rangers.

The Kremlin appeared to have taken notice of at least some of those complaints as Medvedev said on Wednesday that a billion hectares (2.5 billion acres) of forest land had been left without state protection and tasked officials with amending the Forest Code.

“The past summer has shown that the current legislation and forest management are not up to the mark,” the Kremlin said in a statement.

This summer Russia endured an unprecedented heat wave when raging wildfires and burning peat bogs around Moscow choked the capital for days.

Around 500 forestry officials in the Moscow region were fired just before the fires broke out in the region, a spokeswoman for the region's Public Chamber, Maria Yelanova, told AFP on Wednesday.

Subscribe to The China Post and save 25%. Click here

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Terms

Enter your comments - 3000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos
 Respond to this email