One of the coldest places on earth is on fire
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6 min read . Updated: 14 Aug 2021, 12:28 PM IST - Blazes could pump a record amount of climate-warming CO2 into the atmosphere, with wildfires also plaguing California, Turkey and Canada
The smoke from the fires in Russia’s northeast is so thick it has blotted out the sun, plunging swaths of the region into darkness during the brief summer.
A state of emergency has been declared in the city of Yakutsk, where freezing winter temperatures have given it the reputation of being the coldest constantly inhabited city on the planet. Residents have been told to stay indoors while volunteers and firefighters brave temperatures surpassing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
In all, the wildfires have devoured over 10 million acres of land in the Yakutia region this summer, with 175 fires still burning, according to government data. Scientists fear the amount of carbon dioxide released from the Russian blazes could surpass last year’s record. Similar scenes are playing out across several parts of the globe as emergency teams battle wildfires in Turkey, Southern Europe and the U.S., including California and Hawaii, where brush fires have exploded to encompass some 40,000 acres. Scientists say extreme heat in some areas and drought have contributed to sparking the fires.
More than 2,400 firefighters have been deployed to battle the Russian wildfires, supported by troops and military aircraft, while volunteers such as Ayil Dyulurkha have pitched in, desperate to stop the wildfires spreading to towns where they could destroy homes and businesses.
It is a world away from managing the courier company he founded six months ago in Yakutsk, Mr. Dyulurkha said. “When you come back from the fire, you cough and black soot shoots from your nose," he said.
The 48-year-old businessman said he was spurred to action after seeing videos of the blaze shot by residents failing to slow the advances of the flames.
“The despair of these people awakened something inside me," Mr. Dyulurkha recalled. “People were left alone with their misfortune. There wasn’t enough support."
He rallied other volunteers through Facebook and Instagram and soon he had gathered around a dozen people. The number of the ragtag team sometimes falls to five and at others rises to more than two dozen, Mr. Dyulurkha said.
Equipped with respirators and wearing overalls, their 10- to 12-hour shifts include shoveling dirt from the trenches made by tractors to secure the fire break, removing fallen trees that block escape routes, and using backpack water tanks to extinguish spot fires. At night, they keep watch to ensure the fires don’t jump the safety line, Mr. Dyulurkha said.
Sometimes the heat is so overwhelming that some of the volunteers’ rubber boots melt as they work. One fire burned down their forest camp, consuming everything from their equipment to fuel and food, he said.
Fires have burned around 6.8 million acres of land across all of Russia since the beginning of fire season in May, according to government data, making it the fourth year in the row the world’s largest country has been ravaged. The local branch of environmental organization Greenpeace estimates the devastation is likely much greater.
“The situation is very bad," said Alexey Yaroshenko, head of Greenpeace’s forest department. “The problem is not only with very large fires this year, but also the fact that fire disasters of this magnitude are happening every year in the Russian taiga," or boreal forest.
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Federal forest officials said almost half of the fires this year were caused by human negligence, such as careless handling of fires in forests, while a third were due to thunderstorms.
Mr. Yaroshenko said attributing the cause to lightning allowed officials to forgo costly and complex investigations. It also lowers the formal price tag put on the damage, since under the law the costs are assessed differently depending on whether the fire was caused by a person or by a natural phenomenon, he said.
“All of this is largely, if not all, but largely due to climate change—global and in our country," Russian President Vladimir Putin told a meeting Thursday with members of his government, referring not only to the wildfires, but severe flooding that has hit the country in recent weeks.
The economic damage fro this year’s wildfires won’t be known for months. Last year, it amounted to nearly $160 million, but the ecological cost could have been far higher.
Scientists at the European Commission’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service studied satellite images to assess the intensity and location of Russian wildfires calculated that a record 540 megatons of climate-warming carbon dioxide was released in 2020, and this year’s total could be worse.
Russian federal forest officials have said almost $123 million had been allocated to fight fires this year from the federal budget and the government’s reserve fund. But some environmentalists and forest experts say it isn’t enough.
“As a result, the number of people employed in forestry and providing, to one degree or another, protection of forests from fire, decreased significantly," Mr. Yaroshenko at Greenpeace said. “And when a severe drought hits a region and the number of fires begins to grow rapidly…there is simply no one to [immediately] react to all these fires."
Even a few days’ delay in responding “leads to such an increase in fires, which can no longer be handled by any number of people and technology," he said.
Residents in Yakutsk, population 300,000, said they are choking on ash.
Pyotr Gavrilyev has lived in the city most of his life, coping with temperatures that hover around minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit for three months of the year. After suffering a stroke five years ago, he took up walking 3 miles a day around the city and in a suburban park. Smoke from the wildfires has put a stop to that for the past two months and his daily existence has become hellish, he said.
“Imagine sitting in an apartment with closed windows…and going out into the street [and] there is the smell of burning, everywhere there is smoke," said Mr. Gavrilyev, 51, who is retired and lives on disability payments. “If you constantly don’t see the sun, there’s constant smoke, constantly the smell of fire…there are of course such feelings [like living in hell]," he said.
“It happens every year, but this year is the worst," he said.
Scientists say that in addition to worsening carbon emissions, continuous annual wildfires threaten to severely degrade the forest landscape, which covers almost half of Russia. They warn it will lead to a loss of biodiversity, especially when the fires are combined with the felling of trees and attacks from pests and disease, which intensify as the climate changes.
“The long-term consequences can be extremely negative not only for the territory of Russia, but also globally for the Earth’s biosphere," said Aleksandr Pimenov, deputy director of the Institute of Forests of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
People in Yakutia and their supporters have, meanwhile, launched online petitions imploring the federal government for more help in extinguishing the fires before they reach more densely populated areas. One says, “Yakutia is burning alive!"
—Valentina Ochirova and Nonna Fomenko contributed to this article.
(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text)
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