Exhausted firefighters battle Siberia blazes
BYAS-KYUEL: As thick clouds of smoke billow across the vast Siberian region of Yakutia, Yegor Zakharov and his team are racing to stop its smouldering forests from burning even more.
Members of Russia’s Aerial Forest Protection Service, his team spent a recent July evening patrolling a five-kilometre trench they had dug at the edge of the village of Byas-kyuel to keep an approaching wildfire at bay.
Wearing respirators against the acrid smoke, the men lit strips of rubber tyre they hung from sticks, then tapped them onto the dry forest floor on the other side of the trench to start a controlled burn.
The team has lost track of how many blazes they have tackled since late May - mostly successfully, sometimes not - as Yakutia suffers through yet another ever-worsening wildfire seasons.
“We held one property for eight days but it burned in the end because the tractors never got to us,” Zakharov said, explaining that in such cases they use shovels to dig trenches instead.
But even more than equipment, the 35-yearold brigade leader has another urgent plea: “We need more people.”
Fuelled by summer heatwaves, wildfires have swept through more than 1.5 million hectares of Yakutia’s swampy coniferous taiga, with more than a month still to go in Siberia’s annual fire season.
Vast areas of Russia have been suffering from heatwaves and droughts driven by climate change in recent years, with numerous temperature records set.
It is the third straight year that Yakutia - Russia’s coldest region and bordering the Arctic Ocean - has seen wildfires so vicious that they have nearly overwhelmed the forest protection service.
The group of about 250 full-time staffers and 150 summer contract workers, who track the fires by air and drop in by parachute or on off-road trucks, is responsible for a region roughly five times the size of France.
Their goal, said Yakutia’s chief pilot observer Svyatoslav Kolesov, is to put out the fires entirely.
But they also have to contend with blazes that overwhelm their manpower.
The number of firefighters in the region is far from adequate, Kolesov said, recalling that when he started in 1988 the group had around 1,600 people before facing cuts over the years.
Kolesov, who monitors fires from daily flights and issues instructions to teams on the ground, said that because of limited resources the group will often keep an eye on a new blaze until it becomes sizeable. Only then will it send in a team.