Everything burns and burns

In the Pavlovo-Posad district of the Moscow region, one of the dangerous peat areas, a strong fire broke out, as Kommersant reports, the largest this season. The fire was discovered a kilometer from the Veresk gardening partnership; this is the closest large peat fire to Moscow. The smell of burning over the weekend was felt in various settlements in the Gorky direction, including Elektrogorsk, Pavlovsky Posad, and Orekhovo-Zuevo. Eyewitness reports are reminiscent of those in the summer of 2010: smoke, smog, extremely poor visibility, difficulty breathing, someone writes about ash from the sky.

According to official reports from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the active burning area was one and a half hectares. However, it is obvious to experts that the actual area of ​​the fire is significantly underestimated. In the pozar_ru community, created on LiveJournal during the 2010 disasters to collect information about fires and organize assistance, there is a link to a fragment of a map of fires based on images from space, according to which a potentially dangerous territory (covering not only fires, but also space engulfed in smoke, where it is difficult or impossible to extinguish and conduct reconnaissance) is more than 200 hectares. According to the head of the forestry department of Greenpeace Russia, Alexey Yaroshenko, as quoted by Kommersant, “the area of ​​the fire exceeds 500 hectares.” He explains that “this is the area where peat and dry vegetation burn. Most likely, the Ministry of Emergency Situations will extinguish the open fire and report that the fire has been eliminated. At the same time, the peat will continue to smolder until the first serious gust of wind.” Yaroshenko cites as an example a similar situation with a supposedly extinguished fire in the Orekhovo-Zuevsky district: “Now 200 hectares of peat bogs continue to smolder there.”

Since last summer, ecologists have been saying that peat has been burning underground all this time and the only way to protect ourselves from a repeat of last year’s situation is to flood the peat bogs. However, this process was too drawn out, and now it is too late. According to WWF Russia forest policy coordinator Nikolai Shmakov, quoted by the newspaper, one can only rely on the weather, but “if the heat catches up with us, everything will be like last year.”

Meanwhile, fires in the Pavlovsko-Posad district continue to rage, and, as eyewitnesses of the fire near Veresk report on the Greenpeace Russia Forest Forum, representatives of the Ministry of Emergency Situations tell local residents that they will not be able to defend their houses - everything will burn. And again we have to admit that the situation from last year is repeating: at the Rubin gardening partnership, the Emergency Situations Ministry employees do not have hoses for the fire hose, so even though they are standing by the pond, they have nothing to pour water on the fire with. At the same time, as they say on the forum, the girl who called the Ministry of Emergency Situations about the fire near Rubin was told that she would be fined for making a false call. The fire near "Veresk" is extinguished mainly by volunteers and military personnel stationed nearby.

Later it became known that a fire was also raging in the Rosinka gardening community next to Veresk, which began to spread from the swamp to houses.