The Last Exile

Not much attention has been paid to the crisis in Russia in recent weeks in the main street media other than passing mention here and there – but things are very dire.
Here’s an op-ed piece describing what all those who haven’t fled Moscow have been living through from the Moscow Times:

The biggest event of the past two weeks is the fires raging across large swaths of Russia. In Moscow, toxic smog from peat bog fires seeped through shut windows in apartments and offices — regardless of how powerfully your air conditioner was working. The smog made the Moscow that I have known so well since my childhood unrecognizable. Where were the chirps of birds and shouts of children? It seemed that both had evacuated the city, or perhaps their sounds were simply muffled by the thick pall of smoke.

And about those fires – where would Russia be without the volunteers?

Konstantin together with eight other professional firefighters arrived from the Tula region to Yuvino, a village of 80 houses surrounded by the pine forests of the Meshchersky National Park. The firefighters, who have experience extinguishing flaming buildings, do not normally work in forests. The night before, a 40-meter-high wall of fire nearly engulfed Yuvino, together with the firefighters and several residents who chose not to evacuate, they recalled. They were saved by a fortunate change in wind direction.

Many weeks with no rain have left the naturally moist forest bone-dry. Stepping on what was once moss turns it into dust. A mere spark ignites the biomass like gunpowder. “It’s not a forest; it’s a disaster!” said Sergei, a lieutenant colonel in charge of the firefighters in Yuvino. Sergei and other professional firefighters interviewed for this story spoke on condition that their last names be withheld, citing fears of a conflict with their superiors. While some did not want to be seen criticizing the authorities, one firefighter, bare-chested and wearing charcoal-stained pants, said he just did not want to get into trouble for not donning his firefighting uniform. “It’s too hot,” he said.

With two firetrucks at Sergei’s disposal, he has no pump to fill them up. He also lacks tents, so the firefighters have to sleep on the ground or on top of the trucks, covering up with their jackets. The bulky trucks cannot drive close to the forest fire, and the two fire hoses do not reach far enough into the forest from the road. With power lines to Yuvino toppled by falling trees, the firefighters were cut off from the outside world for some time after their cell phone batteries died. Volunteers later provided a generator.

Volunteers, widely snubbed by professional firefighters because of their lack of experience, have saved several villages by using basic shovels and buckets of water and sand. Even after a larger fire is suppressed with a fire hose, the underbrush often continues to burn, and a gust of wind can ignite it into a blaze once again. Using shovels and water backpacks, volunteers in Yuvino isolated burning groundcover, cleared a fire line around the village, and loaned firefighters a pump to fill their trucks.

“When the fires just started, everybody thought of helping the victims. Nobody thought that the firefighters needed help because it is common knowledge that a firefighter arrives at the scene on a firetruck with a fire pump and fully equipped,” said Igor Chersky, a radio host and LiveJournal blogger whose blog has become a coordination center of sorts for volunteers.
“But after a few trips were made to deliver donations, it became clear that the firefighters had nothing but a few rusty trucks, not even food,” he said. “That changed our whole approach. Now the Internet is full of requests for fire hoses and other equipment.”

Supply and demand is coordinated through a few charity organizations and a LiveJournal community called pozar_ru, which is filled with urgent calls for help and drivers offering to deliver supplies as far from Moscow as the Voronezh region.

By Monday, almost 18 million rubles ($590,000), along with about 200 tons of goods, had been donated to the Synodal department of the Russian Orthodox Church, which oversees charity collection and whose church on Nikoloyamskaya Ulitsa in Moscow has become the city’s largest coordination center for donations and volunteers. Some of the money has already been used to buy fire hoses, face masks, pumps and fire extinguishers, it said on its web site, Miloserdie.ru.

Apparently, the Russian climate isn’t the only thing feeling the heat according to this Singapore Strait Times report:

MOSCOW – RUSSIA’S record temperatures and wildfires have shown the authorities retain a Soviet-style reluctance to admit bad news, be it over a potential radiation risk in forests or the death toll from the heatwave.

It was after the USSR’s worst environmental disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant that the Soviet Union imposed its most notorious information blackout, only admitting the calamity had taken place after over two days.The 2010 wildfires have seen the authorities only acknowledge that military logistics facilities burned down or that nuclear sites were close to the wildfires sometimes days after the event. The latest controversy surrounds the website of a forest protection agency linked to the ministry of agriculture which has been blocked since Friday after it revealed fires had burned in areas contaminated by Chernobyl.

The statement by Roslesozashchita sparked worries that radioactive particles from the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the soil of the Bryansk region of western Russia could be released into the air by the fires and pose a health risk. The emergencies ministry had denied that there were any fires in the area.

The Kommersant newspaper reported on Monday Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu had said the site should be ’sorted out’ for publishing ‘false information’. ‘It is censorship. The authorities must inform the population, the fire brigade and volunteers on eventual radioactive danger and take measures for protection,’ Vladimir Slivyak, head of the Eco-Defence group, told AFP. ‘The whole world could see from satellite photos that there were fires in the Bryansk region.’