Conclusions from burning tracks

The Federal Fire Service should be made an independent department

The unprecedented forest fires of the past summer revealed to citizens a fact that is strange from the point of view of common sense: extinguishing wild fires is not a legally established function of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations. The task of the ministry is to assist the executive authorities of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation in eliminating forest fires. The Ministry of Emergency Situations has been relieved of all responsibility for practical work, since it is entrusted to the heads of local authorities. There is antagonism within the ministry between rescuers and firefighters. In particular, because firefighters have always considered red to be their color, but today they are forced to repaint themselves blue. It's hard to imagine a fire crew on a blue fire truck.

But most importantly, the 250,000-strong army of Russian firefighters is offended by the plight of their stepchildren. The fire service of the Ministry of Emergency Situations is divided into first- and second-class workers. The first group includes employees of the Ministry of Emergency Situations in uniform, the second group includes fire service workers, whose payment terms are determined by another order. For people in uniform, a pension is calculated according to the formula “salary according to rank + salary according to position + length of service.” For workers without shoulder straps, a pension will be accrued by the Pension Fund with only one benefit - if the length of service is 25 years and the age is 50.

Today, the Ministry of Emergency Situations is practically unable to fulfill even the most reduced provisions left over from the former civil defense service of the USSR and determined by the decree of the President of the Russian Federation of July 11, 2004. Even the “informing the population through the media and other channels about emerging emergency situations” prescribed in the decree is not possible no later than 1.5-2 hours after the occurrence of this very emergency situation.

Over the 20 years of its existence, the Ministry of Emergency Situations has not been able to organize a warning system even in the capital. What can we say then about the country as a whole, which gets by on word of mouth? Although from 2006 to 2010, the volume of budget funding for the creation of an all-Russian comprehensive system for informing and warning the population in places where people are in large numbers (OKSION) amounted to over 1.825 billion rubles.

During the days of forest fires, it became clear what the fire service had become under the tutelage of the Ministry of Emergency Situations: no equipment, no specialists, no money. There is a collapse of the state structure that ensures the safety of people. The fruits of dispersing the professional core of the fire service are already visible. Since then, when firefighters were part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the indicators have clearly worsened. There is no longer a unified system for fighting forest fires in Russia.

In Soviet times, all forests were divided into blocks, it was possible for equipment to travel to localize a crown fire, and harrowing was carried out. Even though around any village there were fields with crops, and not hay, as now. At that time, there were several different services involved in forest protection: forest fire protection, a network of volunteer fire brigades, and aviation forest protection. The federal status of the latter made it possible to quickly transfer planes, helicopters and paratroopers-firefighters landing near the burning site to other regions.

Several years ago, aviation forest protection lost its federal status. Some of its elements remained under the jurisdiction of the regions, but the effectiveness of the service was lost. Everything that was received by the federal aviation forest protection came under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Emergency Situations - for the creation in 2010 of an international European squadron, which was used to extinguish forest fires in the Balkans, Greece and Italy.

The Ministry of Emergency Situations is working to create its own system for extinguishing forest fires, but is guided by false premises: space monitoring, expensive technical means of aviation fire extinguishing - Be-200, Il-76 tanker aircraft. Extinguishing burning peat bogs using an airplane is a disastrous task, but very expensive. Peat burns at a depth of one meter, and water dropped from a helicopter or plane does not reach such a depth. But such a release of water is very expensive.

The creation of such a system will cost tens and hundreds of times more than the cost of developing the forest fire protection system that existed before January 1, 2007. The Ministry of Emergency Situations practically does not have the ability to decipher satellite images, being late by two to three days. Russian GLONASS is imperfect, so the Ministry of Emergency Situations often uses American and European meteorological images.

Much hope was placed on the Russian army in extinguishing fires. But with the current structure, it is not able to provide assistance to the population during fires. Cadets with shovels don't make the weather. Before the current reform, each division had a separate engineer battalion with barrage vehicles, heavy equipment at a tank base, and water extraction stations. There are no divisions, and with them, nothing else. During the liquidation of the Engineering Academy named after. Kuibyshev, the department of water production was reduced. It simply needs to be restored after catastrophic fires.

The USSR armed forces had 18 pipeline brigades capable of deploying 120 km of pipeline with a diameter of 100 and 150 mm per day. Civil defense units had sets of pipelines up to 15 km long. To extinguish fires, air bombing was carried out, clearing vehicles, and installations for laying passages in minefields were used. But the pipeline crews have now been disbanded. Only the brigade of the Moscow Military District was able to stretch the line 10 km.

The current fires are coming to an end, and the authorities must see the flaws in today's Ministry of Emergency Situations, in reforming the army, realize the need to revive state forest protection, restore federal air forest protection, change legislation, introduce a code of conduct for federal, regional, local structures and prepare residents for evacuation. The fire service, in our opinion, should become, as in all civilized countries, an independent federal structure - without police or rescue shoulder straps.

Anatoly TSYGANOK, head of the Center for Military Forecasting