Yes, literally. This morning, when I went out, I smelled the smoke. It was clearly the smell of forest fire. The sky wasn't clear blue anymore, it was more like greyish blue and wind was from east, right from Russia... The border is about 250 kilometers away from here, but still the smoke smells. In fact, according the news the smoke was smelled much further west today, at least over 400 kilometers away from the east border.
Russians are bad firefighters. Over 22 million hectares of forests have already burned during this summer... Here in Finland we have had also a lot of forest fires during this summer, but our fire brigades have managed to extinguish all of them very quickly.
14th of August was the worst so far, the smoke was clearly visible everywhere.
4 comments:
We must remember, that our road network takes us a bit more easily to the fire area, then in the vast wilderness in Russia. We are talking about a little bit bigger wild forests there...
That's true, but at the moment there's over 40 forest fires near our border in Russia and there it's not the question of vast wilderness, like somewhere in Siberia. Russians just don't seem to care to extinguish forest fires until they come too close to towns and villages.
Most of the forest close to Russian/Finnish border are desolate areas with no roads, houses nor firebrigades.
What comes to Russians´ caring/not caring about forest fires - that´s something I don´t have knowledge of.
Not so desolated, if you take a look at road maps of Leningradskaja Oblast.
I discussed about this subject with my friend who's a fire chief in south eastern Finland. He told that the basic problem is that Russians have two kind of fire brigades; forest fire brigades and normal fire brigades. The latter one concentrates on building fires but they don't extinguish forest fires - because it's a job of forest fire brigades. But forest fire brigades extinguish only state owned forests, but not the private forests. So that's why they let them burn. Only hope is, perhaps, if the wind blows all the smoke to Moscow, then someone could command fire brigades to stop the fires...
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