Byas-Kyuel: Like a thick smoke cloud across the spacious Siberian Yakutia area, Yegor Zakharov and his team raced to stop burning forests even more.
Members of the Russian air forest protection service, his team spent the July night recently patrolled a five-kilometer trench (three miles) that they had digged on the edge of the village of Byas-Kyuel to keep forest fires that approached the bay.
Wearing a respirator against smoke sharply, people turned on the rubber tire strip they hung from the stick, then tapped it to the dry forest floor on the other side of the trench to start controlled burns.
The team has lost track of how much the fire they have arrested since lately it works mostly, sometimes unlike Yakutia suffer from other worsening forest fire seasons.
“We held one property for eight days but it was burned in the end because the tractor never reached us,” Zakharov said, explaining that in such cases they used a shovel to dig a trench.
But even more than just the equipment, the 35-year-old brigade leader has another urgent request: “We need more people.” Fueled by Summer Hearu, forest fires have swept more than 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million hectares) from Taiga Kamutian Swampy Kamutia, with more than a month that will still enter the Siberian annual fire season.
The area of Russia has suffered hot waves and drought driven by climate change in recent years, with many set temperature records.
It is the third year in a row that the coldest region of Yakutia Russia and borders the Arctic Ocean has made forest fires so cruel so they almost flooded forest protection services.
The group of around 250 full-time staff and 150 summer contract workers, who tracked fire through the air and stopped by a parachute or in an off-road truck, responsible for an area of about five times the size of France.
Their aim, said Yakutia pilot observer, Svyatoslav Kolesov, was to extinguish the fire completely.
But they also have to compete with the blazes that flood their energy.
The number of firefighters in this region is far from adequate, Kolaov told AFP, given that when he began in 1988 the group had around 1,600 before facing cuts for years.
Kolesov, who monitors fires from daily flights and issued instructions to the team in the field, saying that because of limited resources, groups will often keep an eye on new flames until it becomes quite large.
Only so will be sent in the team.
“And if the fire spread quickly and immediately covered a large area, then we tried to save areas inhabited and strategic objects,” he said.
Environmental lovers have long argued that Russia violated the ability of her forest fires.
The Ministry of Environment itself is open on the policy, in 2015 issued a decree that allows the region to ignore the Blazes if the cost of fighting fires exceeds the expected damage.
“We have said for years that Russia needs to increase its budget to combat forest fires at least three times,” Grigory Kukin, Head of the Greenpeace Wildfire unit in the country, told AFP.
In early July, Russia mobilized the defense and emergency ministry to help Yakutia fight forest fires, while dozens of volunteers also took the fight.
But the lack of funds for air forest protection services, the only group that is fully dedicated to fighting forest fires, according to Kolesov is proven on the ground.
The Zakharov Brigade leader said he asked the official repeatedly for a quad bike that never arrived so that his people did not have to patrol it on foot.
“I lent most of my equipment to the team at the nearest API,” he explained.
Then he received an all-terrain vehicle, but not before the official during the recent planning meeting underestimated the progress of his team consisting of five full-time staff and eight summer contractors had been made.
“Does their rights have to criticize us?” Zakharov said, adding he had stormed before the meeting ended.
“Our people have worked in the forest for a month in a row.
Anyone will start tired.” The leader of the brigade and his men planned to fight at that time.
After Byas-Kyuel, they plan to switch to the next fire without rest.
“If we don’t exist,” Zakharov said, “everything will burn.”
‘We need more people’: firefighters who are exhausted by Battle Siberia Blazes
