Russians demand vast wildfires consuming Siberia be
extinguished
Tom Balmforth
MOSCOW (Reuters) - More than half a million Russians have
demanded the authorities do more to tackle vast wildfires in Siberia that
environmentalists have dubbed an ecological catastrophe, but which officials
have said would be “pointless” to put out.
An aerial view shows smoke from wildfires rising above the
Verkhoyansky district of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Russia in this
handout picture obtained by Reuters on July 30, 2019. Press Service of the
Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) Government/Handout via REUTERS
Wildfires cover almost 3 million hectares of forest, an area
almost the size of Belgium, according to the Federal Forestry Agency, and have
prompted states of emergencies to be declared in five Russian regions.
Greenpeace said on Monday that acrid smog had wafted across
Siberia as far as the Ural mountains, posing a threat to people’s health.
“The situation with the forest fires in Siberia has long
ceased to be a local problem and has turned into an ecological catastrophe on
the scale of the entire country,” Greenpeace wrote on social media on Monday.
A petition circulated online by an ecologist from the
Siberian city of Tomsk had garnered 724,000 signatures as of Tuesday calling on
authorities to take tougher action and to declare a Siberia-wide state of
emergency.
The petition has no binding powers, but its author hoped
public pressure would translate into government action.
Firefighters are working to put out forest fires covering
almost 100,000 hectares in Siberia’s Irkutsk and other regions, but other
wildfires raging on 2.8 million hectares are only being monitored, the Federal
Forestry Agency said on Tuesday.
Authorities have said they do not plan to expend resources
on fighting the latter as they are mainly in remote, uninhabited areas - known
as “control zones” - and therefore not a direct threat to people.
“This is a normal, natural phenomenon, it’s pointless to
fight it and perhaps even in some places also harmful,” the governor of
Krasnoyarsk region, Alexander Uss, was quoted as saying by RIA news agency on
Monday.
Uss said sending firefighters would put their lives at risk
because of thick smoke and the sheer remoteness of the fires.
Greenpeace, however, said the authorities were wrong to say
the fires, which have been burning for several weeks, affected only uninhabited
parts of the country.
“There are people there! The lines of the control zones fall
in such a way that settlements fall within them,” it said.
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