While Moscow was inundated with snow this winter, and forced to wait until the end of April for the real arrival of spring, other regions of Russia have been both drier and warmer over the past few months.
Snowless winters and early, warm springs can spell trouble, however, especially for regions in Siberia and the Far East, as Russia has already been hit by a spate of wildfires.
The Emergency Situations Ministry reports that dozens of fires have broken out in heavily forested regions, and as of the end of last week, severe fires were burning in the southeast Siberian taiga.
Then-acting First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov, in a teleconference on firefighting last week, announced that 500,000 hectares were burning, the website of the Federal Forestry Agency reported. More than 80 percent of the fires are in the Zabaikalsky region and Buryatia, both east of Lake Baikal.
Memories of 2010
In the wake of 2010’s disastrous wildfires, 5 billion rubles of new equipment was purchased for fire services
Meanwhile, the forestry agency has been preparing for the fire season through all of 2011, keeping in mind the previous year’s disaster.
In 2010, approximately 30,000 wildfires hit Russia, causing 50 casualties and burning down 3,500 houses in villages across the country. Almost 2 million hectares of forest were consumed, with state employee website Gosbook reporting total financial damages of 85.5 billion rubles ($2.9 billion) – more than four times the federal forestry budget for that year.
Time to regroup
Throughout 2011, forestry and emergency authorities assessed what had gone wrong. A new law was passed to restore the powers of state foresters, which had been reduced by the new Forestry Code in 2007, and firefighters were supplied with new equipment. Five billion rubles ($160 million) were allocated for new machines, while an additional 4.5 billion rubles were laid out over the year for further improvements, including wildfire prevention, forestry agency spokesman Vladimir Dmitriyev told The Moscow News.
To establish more effective prevention measures, greater focus was placed on the regions, which contributed about $3.5 billion rubles ($117 million), with the rest of the funding coming from the federal government, Dmitriyev said.
Among the new measures are regional fire services, placed under the control of local authorities and led by experienced fire jumpers, who parachute or rappel from helicopters to tackle wildfires on the ground.
Technological developments
500,000 hectares of forest have already been reported as burning in 2012
A more responsive chain of command goes hand-in-hand with technological innovations, however, with advanced systems of fire detection being installed throughout remote woodland regions.
“Better technologies are coming, including thermal viewers,” Dmitriyev said, referring to devices that can detect infrared light emitted by fires. Forestry units across the country are receiving online monitoring devices and servers made by companies such as AFK Sistema or DSK, which has launched its Lesnoi Dozor (“Forest Watch”) system.
The development of the system received government funding, and was fostered by the Skolkovo fund. Lesnoi Dozor has been already installed in 12 regions, and is in use at the World Wildlife Fund’s natural reservation in the Russian Far East. It can be connected to the visual data stream of satellites, helping firefighters receive the coordinates of a fire with an accuracy of not less than 250 meters, better than just off the satellites alone.
Satellites not enough
The Krasnoyarsk region, 70 percent forested taiga, is notoriously vulnerable
Vladimir Terentyev, a Krasnoyarsk businessman, was a deputy chief forest inspector of the Krasnoyarsk region until 2007. The region is 70 percent taiga – more than 168 million hectares, 104,000 of which suffered fire damage in 2011, the regional branch of the Federal Statistics Service reports.
Terentyev said that satellites’ infrared scanners can find “thermal points” of a fire that emit heat, but they are not that precise.
“If you send a team of firefighters to the location given, it may turn out that the fire is a kilometer away from the landing point,” he said.
The crucial task, he explained, is to locate the exact source point of the fire as quickly as possible.
“I think technologies such as online video monitoring are very good for it, but aerial surveillance could also be very helpful,” Terentyev said.
Fewer planes on call
While effective, aerial surveillance also requires the maintenance of an expensive fleet of planes
Aerial surveillance is very costly, however, and while in the Soviet period there were 25 surveillance planes on call every day in the Krasnoyarsk region alone, today there are only 50 planes on call and 86 in reserve for the entire country, the forestry agency’s Dmitriyev said.
Such a small number is insufficient, Terentyev said, but government emergency budgets are already stretched and unable to meet Soviet-era provision due to increasing maintenance costs.
In populated areas, however, the role of civilian volunteers, either as monitors or as firefighters, has become increasingly important, as was demonstrated in 2010. Volunteers now use the Internet to form their own social networks, and for those with smartphones and tablets, the forestry agency has developed a special emergency application for free download via its website, which can alert authorities to a fire with just a couple of clicks.
Source: www.themoscownews.com