Russia fights on how to stop the fires
Harmful smoke, suffocating the Russian capital for many of this summer swirl peat swamps dried up like the one in the context of a small village known as the settlement 17. It consists of two log cabins.Hardly flame is visible.
However, he had spent firefighters battling a blaze on the stubborn ground and moving through the field 25 acres hoses and blow away and columns of smoke rising from the surface of the black. Poultry in one spot, and the danger is spreading underground, shows hundreds of meters.
Russian officials say the only sure way to stop the peat fires to flood the earth, and restore its natural wetlands. The Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's support for such an approach, but there is one hitch: This powder stains on the eastern edge of Moscow is home to nearly half a million people in 10,000 dacha communities scattered. A few of them care to leave.
"We have no moral right to flood out," said Andre Keller, head of the region Chtoura, 77 miles east of Moscow. "We will find other ways to control the fires."
Russia also suffered during the summer and heat standard, and forest fires, crop, and cast the blame on the leaders of natural forces. Peat fires, on the other hand, is the legacy of decades of bad management of the vast tracts of the countryside, scientists, historians say.
Beginning in 1918, Soviet engineers drained peat bogs to provide electric power plants. Forty years later began to replace peat plants with the newly discovered natural gas from Siberia. Also died in the mines from the peat industry, no one bothered to reflood in a swamp.
Then in the mid-1980s the Soviet authorities gave away parts of the territory dryer, near Moscow and other cities, thousands of city dwellers so that they can build homes at the weekend. Have clung to their rural homes to peat fires broke out in every summer, usually sparked by careless smokers and the camp. The fires near Moscow in 2002 and this year's very intense.
"We are paying the price for the position of the brutal nature," said Ivan Sudnitsyn, biologist, member of the Russian Academy of natural wetlands Sciences.Peat is compacted layers of rotting vegetation formed over tens of thousands of years. In Chtoura, some deep as 23 feet. When caught, they burn more slowly than a forest fire model, but as far as what you consume 10 times more bio-mass per acre, and give off a lot of smoke and difficult to extinguish. All countries that have dried up, including the United States and Canada, and such fires, but many of them thick smoke in the remote areas, and drew little public attention or protest.
With strong easterly winds, and peat fires and wreak havoc in Moscow this summer, urging officials to revive the plan have not been met formulated after fires in 2002 to reflood peat mines.
Because the peat fire generates less heat from the surface of the fire, the smoke stays near the ground. In Moscow, peat smoke and postponed flights at airports, and shrouded the Red Square and other landmarks in the fog of milky white and leaked to the homes and offices, and a slowdown in economic activity and endanger the health of millions.
The Government reported progress Sunday in limiting the extent of forest and peat fires in all parts of Russia. But the wind turned north to clear the air in Moscow late last week once again, bringing the smoke back and pay the concentration of air pollutants to five times the normal level.
"There are a lot of really bad things that are given off when burning peat, carbon monoxide, sulfates, nitrous oxide," said Lisa Curran, a professor at Stanford University, Environment and Anthropology, which studies peat fires. "They cause problems in the respiratory tract and eyes at the burning smoke in the air." Moscow Region 492 000 acres of marsh peat 0.148000 of which were drained, and abandoned harvested, according to Torfgeologiya, geological research firm. Russia's Emergencies Ministry has recorded 482 peat fires this summer on the 1290 acres of marsh dried, within 100 miles east of the capital.
Here in Chtoura, and firefighters were battling fires, peat two, one in 17 settlements and one on the edge of a larger community dacha, Rosinka 3. Also seen one set needlelike Deep craters in the ground and pumping water. The last chapter in the two players and several high-level aircraft spray plume of smoke scattered.
The residents were evacuated safely from the two communities, with the exception of a few who remained in Rosinka 3 to assist in the defense of dozens of firefighters to the settlement of dachas. Burning any of the dachas. But put fires on the survival of communities.
Plan to revive the floods, subject to approval by the Federal and calls to 670 million dollars in spending over the next three years. Officials did not specify the populated areas which, if any, will be evacuated and placed under water.
Any evacuation is likely to meet resistance here. Such as residents of the coastal wetlands in the state of Louisiana who cling to their homes during the hurricane seasons, and the owners of the dacha 3 Rosinka much challenge.
"Certainly these fires pose a threat, but this is our land and we love it," said Alexander Pavlov, a factor that transportation company 54-year-old from Moscow, lighting a cigarette in the air foul and firefighters worked to patch near his dacha. "If they want to flood the land, and allow them to build a pond there, away from our homes," referring to a forest of smoke. "We can stock with fish."
The environment is divided on the extent of need floods. Yevgeny Sharts, global director of wildlife and conservation policy of Russia, and calls for the evacuation of the entire ancient peat mines.
"We're mainly talking about people who are not very wealthy and those who have small dachas in marginal areas," he said. "We need to spend money to provide new land for these people, otherwise we will face the same high risk of new fires every summer."
But said Tatiana Minaeva, program coordinator for Russian Dutch-based International Wetlands, and can design a plan to flood the land as much as possible without the uprooting of people. This is the approach favored by Mr. Keller, and senior elected officials of the 160,000 people in the area Chtoura.
In an interview, said he is more important in raising the water level in the vast network of canals that were dug decades ago to drain the swamp in a river. And more water in the channels enable the authorities to wet down the old mines on a more frequent and fire-fighting when they erupt.
To achieve this, he said, local authorities need money from Moscow to replace the barriers such as the dam, which was stolen from the channels as they fell by neglect over the years. "We need to keep large amounts of water in the territory of what we can, so that we will be able to use it effectively in the spring when the peat is happening in the dry and the fires and start again," he said. "But we do not want to turn back to Chtoura quagmire."
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