Volunteers joining crews to fight raging forest fires
GORNY ULUS, Russia — The little domed tents of the volunteer firefighters in the clearing of a Siberian forest can be hard to see — even from only a few steps away — because of the choking smoke. Their shovels and saws seem to be tiny tools against the vast blaze, like toy weapons brought to a war.
But their love of the vast and wild region is a powerful motivator in a summer of sprawling fires that might become Russia’s worst ever.
As of Monday, about 4.6 million acres of forest were burning in Russia — an area larger than the U.S. state of Connecticut.
More than 5,000 regular firefighters are involved, but the scale is so large and the area is so enormous that 55% of the fires aren’t being fought at all, according to Avialesookhrana, the agency that oversees the effort.
That means the volunteers, who take time off work and rely on their own money or nongovernmental funds, are a small but important addition to the overwhelmed forces.
“The guys (volunteers) are doing a great job. Their help is significant because the area and distances are quite large, so the more people there are, the more effective our efforts are to control the fires,” said Denis Markov, an instructor at a base for paratrooper firefighters in Tomsk, who is working with some of the volunteers.
The hardest hit area is the Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, in the far northeast of Russia, about 3,200 miles from Moscow. About 85% of all of Russia’s fires are in the republic, and heavy smoke forced a temporary closure of the airport in the regional capital, Yakutsk, a city of about 280,000 people.
As the smoke intensified, Ivan Nikiforov took a leave from his office job in the city — not to escape the bad air but to head into the fires as a volunteer.
“I think it’s important to participate as a volunteer because our republic, our shared land and our forests are burning. This is what we’ll be leaving for our children and our grandchildren,” he said at his group’s encampment west of Yakutsk.
Nikiforov and a small contingent of other volunteers dig firebreak trenches, chop down trees and set small controlled fires to try to block the spread.
Volunteers in the area received some support from the nongovernmental agency SinetSpark, which provided sleeping bags, gloves and heavy equipment. Alexandra Kozulina, the group’s director of projects, said SinetSpark initially had planned to spend its money on information campaigns but decided to provide equipment as fires worsened.
The main problem, many observers say, is that the size of the aerial forest protection agency has been reduced, along with the number of rangers.
The 2007 changes that reduced the number of rangers also gave control over timberlands to regional authorities and businesses, eroding centralized monitoring, fueling corruption and contributing to illegal treecutting practices that help spawn fires.
Critics also say the law allows authorities to let fires burn in certain areas if the potential damage is considered not worth the cost of containing them.