The death toll from the worst summer wildfires to hit Russia in a generation has risen to 34, officials said yesterday, as firefighters battled to prevent the flames claiming more lives and property.
Amid unusual public criticism that the authorities were slow to react to spreading fires last week, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was due to hold an emergency meeting with governors of the worst-affected regions.
“According to current information, 34 people have been killed as a result of the fires,” Vladimir Stepanov, the head of national center for crisis management at the emergencies ministry, said on state television.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The previous death toll had stood at 30. It appeared that the increase in the death toll resulted from the discovery of more bodies around the region of Nizhny Novgorod on Sunday.
“In the last 24 hours the general dynamic is that the general number of fires is decreasing,” Stepanov said. “The main task for us today — not allowing fires appearing in inhabited areas and prevent the deaths of people — has been fulfilled.”
The emergencies ministry has deployed hundreds of thousands of workers along with 2,000 members of the armed forces to fight a disaster described by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as one that happens only “every 30 or 40 years.”
The worst-hit regions have included the area around the city of Nizhny Novgorod in central Russia, Voronezh in southwestern Russia as well as the Moscow region itself.
At least 1,875 houses have been destroyed in fires, leaving more than 2,000 people homeless, the regional development ministry said Sunday, with around about 128,000 hectares of land on fire.
But the authorities have insisted they now have the situation under control, and Stepanov said 265 inhabited areas were “saved” from fires over the last 24 hours.
He said that on average 300 fires were appearing every day but 95 percent of them were extinguished within a 24-hour period.
Moscow itself was again blanketed yesterday in heavy smog generated from peat fires burning in the countryside, with the center of the city permeated by a smell of smoke and the tops of skyscrapers invisible in the early morning.
Putin, rarely criticized in Russia, found himself harangued by angry victims of the fires when he visited the Nizhny Novogorod region and later himself slammed local officials for their slack response.
“The federal government showed it was not ready to fight the fires. The local authorities, with their small budgets also could not cope,” the opposition Novaya Gazeta newspaper said.
“The victory of centralization and the ‘vertical of power’ smells of flames,” it said, referring to one of the main slogans of Putin’s rule.
A country notorious for its bitterly cold winters, Russia is enduring its severest heat wave for decades, which has seen all-time temperature records tumble throughout last month.
Forecasters have warned there is no chance of the heat wave relenting for the moment, with temperatures for between 35ºC to 42ºC expected in Moscow and central Russia over the next days.
Meanwhile, Deputy Russian Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov urged local authorities not to allow people to enter forests, where their presence could create the risk for further fires, Interfax reported.
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