RUSSIAN FIRES TOLL HITS 50, ANIMAL HOME IN DANGER
MANSUR MIROVALEV
(AP)
5/8/10
PLOTAVA, Russia – Wildfires were raging close to a shelter housing
hundreds of dogs and retired circus animals, animal activists said
Thursday, as the death toll from weeks of blazes across Russia rose
to 50.
Rescuers pulled a body out from a provincial village gutted by
wildfires and another person died of their injuries overnight, the
Emergencies Ministry said. Almost 600 separate fires were still raging,
mostly in western Russia, as the country endured its hottest summer
on record.
The director of the animal shelter, in the village of Khoteichi,
40 miles (64 kilometers) east of Moscow, said he and volunteers had
already extinguished a fire that came within 150 yards (150 meters) and
were bracing for more blazes. The shelter is home to more than 1,800
animals, mainly dogs, but also bears, monkeys, foxes and tortoises.
“With the speed of fire, we don’t know if we can save them all,”
Sergei Serdyuk said of the animals.
Nearby fire stations did not answer calls when Tuesday’s blaze
advanced – one official hung up as soon as he heard the word fire,
said Serdyuk, who added he has spent the last days dousing trees with
water and digging trenches.
Thick smog that had blanketed Moscow partially lifted early Thursday
but could return with no end in sight to a record heat wave,
officials warned.
Temperatures up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) have exacerbated
forest and peat bog fires across Russia’s central and western regions,
destroying close to 2,000 homes. Officials have suggested the 10,000
firefighters battling the blazes aren’t enough.
The forecast for the week ahead shows little change in the capital
and surrounding regions, where the average summer temperature is
around 23 Celsius (75 Fahrenheit).
The body was found in a village near Russia’s fifth-largest city,
Nizhny Novgorod, about 300 miles (480 kilometers) east of Moscow and
the hospital death occurred near Voronezh, southeast of Moscow. Those
regions are among the worst-hit.
In the blaze-ravaged village of Plotava, some 35 miles (60 kilometers)
east of Moscow, local official Viktor Sorokin lamented that the number
of fire wardens in woodland and peat bog areas had halved to 150 the
last few years under new rules.
“There used to be more of them, now there aren’t enough,” he said.
Some locals are taking the initiative to make up the shortfall in
firefighters.
“We woke up several days ago and we couldn’t breathe,” said Alexander
Babayev, a 27-year-old owner of a drive-in theater, before taking a
hose to low rising flames flickering above the smoldering ground.
Babayev assembled a motley team of volunteers using a social networking
website and, after a few instructions from professionals, they began
tending to fires.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised to build new, better
homes before winter, and vowed each victim would receive $6,600 in
compensation. The sum is huge in a country whose average monthly
wage is around $800, and Russian media say some residents may have
deliberately torched their dwellings to qualify.
To the east, firefighters focused on beating flames back from a
top-secret nuclear research facility in the city of Sarov. A Sarov
news website on Thursday cited local officials as saying a wall of
fire had been broken down into several smaller blazes. On Wednesday,
officials said the closest blaze was still several miles (kilometers)
from the main facilities at the Russian Federal Nuclear Research
Center and as a precaution all hazardous materials had been evacuated.
In the capital, President Dmitry Medvedev fired several high-ranking
military officials Wednesday over what he called criminal negligence
in fires that ravaged a military base.
Russia has been sent helicopters and planes to help douse the flames
from Ukraine, Armenia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Emergencies
Minister Sergei Shoigu said in televised comments.
Associated Press writers Khristina Narizhnaya and David Nowak
contributed to this report.
From: A. Papazian