Forest fires sparked by heatwave claim lives of 25 Russians

Published on Friday 30 July 2010 16:00

Forest fires raged across Russia yesterday, destroying villages, surrounding one southern city and killing at least 25 people, including three firefighters.

Prime minister Vladimir Putin visited survivors at one devastated village and urged officials to redouble efforts to put out the fires.

They have spread quickly across more than 200,000 acres in recent days after a record heatwave and severe drought. July has been the hottest month in Moscow since records began there 130 years ago. Fields and forests have dried up, and much of this year's wheat harvest has been ruined.

Mr Putin yesterday visited the ruins of Verkhnyaya Vereya, where all 341 houses were burned to the ground and five people died. The village was one of three destroyed around Nizhny Novgorod, Russia's fifth largest city located 300 miles east of Moscow.

"Before winter, each house will be restored," Mr Putin told a crowd of mainly women. "I promise - the village will be rebuilt."

Fires have all but encircled Voronezh, a city of 850,000 people, some 300 miles south of Moscow. More than 900 patients had to be evacuated from a Voronezh hospital and almost 2,000 children from summer camps in the path of the fires. Helicopters were being used by firefighters to try to douse the flames from the air.

At least 25 people have died in the past two days from the forest fires, officials said. Outbreaks in the Voronezh, Nizhny Novogorod and Moscow regions alone have destroyed more than 1,000 houses and left more than 2,000 homeless, according to officials. Fires also were raging in 11 other areas within central and southern Russia.

The death toll includes five people, including one firefighter, in Voronezh, and six residents and a firefighter who died when a fire swept through the village of Mokhovoye in the Moscow region. The other deaths were in the Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan and Lipetsk regions, all south or east of Moscow.

On his tour yesterday, Mr Putin urged local officials to step up operations to contain the fires and asked president Dmitry Medvedev to send troops to help. Television showed Mr Putin in a birch forest calling the president on a mobile phone and then switched to footage of Mr Medvedev taking the call at the Kremlin.

Forest fires reached Moscow's western fringe on Thursday, but were extinguished toward nightfall. Cooler air from the west brought some respite from the heat on Friday and cleared a potentially dangerous smog cloud caused by peat bogs burning east and south of the capital.

The temperature hit 37.8C in Moscow on Thursday, setting a new record.