Forest fires have become a growing disaster for Russia: how to fight

In the Moscow region, a special fire regime has been established – “restriction on visiting forest areas” until May 23. This means that it is better not to go into the forest, and any open fire, including barbecue, is prohibited. This year, almost all over the country, not only in the Moscow Region, two natural disasters converged at once – an unprecedented dry spring and the annual fall of grass. The fire situation remains difficult in the Urals, especially in the Sverdlovsk region, in the Tyumen and Omsk regions, in Transbaikalia. And in Kurgan, they found out that children are often the perpetrators of arson.

In the Kurgan region, where 21 people died from fire, more than 300 houses burned down (and almost 4,000 houses were damaged), it was found that along with irresponsible adults, teenagers often set fire to the grass.

With the help of facial recognition cameras and investigative actions, 46 perpetrators of the so-called landscape fires were identified, 7 criminal cases were opened. It turned out that 15 of these arsonists were minors. And apart from how to put them on record in the PND, there are no measures of influence for such an act. Parents get off with small fines.

The governor of the region spoke in the sense that if they are registered with the police and for the drive, “they will no longer be hired by some law enforcement agencies and will not be admitted to prestigious universities.”

Meanwhile, insiders note that not only irresponsible children and citizens without a king in their heads are engaged in burning and arson. Sometimes the so-called businessmen also harvest wood logs in this way and burn the logging residues. There were cases when it was precisely such “loggers” who paid minors for arson. According to other information, sabotage in the form of arson of large territories is also possible this year. Be that as it may, not some abstract dry thunderstorms, but a person is guilty of 99 out of 100 forest fires, environmentalists say.

In Siberia, local activists, “greens” and doctors from burn centers have been saying for years that the authorities are not taking sufficient measures either: they don’t dig the field, they don’t do controlled burning in the steppe. Every year people and wild animals become victims of fires.

The scale of the current fires in Russia is being compared to the Australian fires of 2019-20, when a billion animals and birds died in the fire. Small animals are especially affected by fire: mice, chipmunks, amphibians. And birds that already have a hatch, and indeed all those who have small offspring. Parents do not abandon their cubs and die with them. Large animals, such as moose, deer, wolves, migrate more easily, but they often get burned and then die from lack of food. And the forest itself is restored from fires for 10-15 years, and the cedar forest – at least 50 years.

In the Moscow region, where there are no cedars and steppes, already in the first ten days of April, it was blazing in Kolomna, Zaraysk and Lyubertsy. And by the end of the month, the press service of “Mosoblpozhspas” said that throughout the Moscow Region there was not a single urban district left where grass fires had not been recorded.

The habit of burning grass is so deeply ingrained in people that neither the authorities nor the “greens” have yet been able to cope. Despite the fact that firefighters and the Ministry of Emergency Situations carry out raids regularly. And in some areas, communities of local social activists, ecologists, doctors, teachers have self-organized, who hang leaflets about the dangers of fallen grass, and conduct conversations, including with schoolchildren, and patrol the area.

Experts say that even some farmers in the Moscow Region are convinced that spring fallen grass improves soil structure and kills pests, ixoid mites, for example. In public, where photos and messages periodically appear on the topic “teenagers are burning grass under my windows, what should I do?”, There are always those who approve of the fall. “I think that the guys are great, they are burning dead wood,” a woman from Balashikha writes. “If you take a ride around the region, you can see that both local residents and many farmers, as well as workers of agro-complexes and fields, clean up and burn dead wood in meadows near forests or forest belts.”…

“Spring fallen grass is a wild, vandal habit that creates a lot of problems not only in our country,” says environmental activist Pavel Ryumin. So the first thing you need is information. Through schools, through raids and public organizations, through social networks, it is necessary to convey to people that the main danger of mass burnings is not even the risk of forest fires, although they are monstrous. And the release of harmful substances from combustion: carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other toxic combustion products. They arise not only from the combustion of rubber and plastic, as many people think, but from the combustion of natural material too.

Another stereotype: “After dry grass has fallen, grass grows better.” Grass grows worse because you have burned the top layer of soil, bacteria, insects and even worms in the near-surface layer. The strongest will survive in such a situation, and these are usually stubborn weeds like sow thistle, nettle, horsetail or Sosnovsky’s hogweed.

Why do many farmers still use incineration – because it’s cheap. Machines for collecting crop residues require investment, manual labor is also costly. Therefore, the problem fell grass and dead wood worldwide. They deal with it in different ways.

Massive use of cars by the Netherlands and Japan, in the US and Canada huge fines for burning, there for proven environmental damage you can go to jail.

But not with a single club – forest protection organizations have been created in many countries, such as the National Forest Fund, the International Union for the Conservation of Forests, the Forest Alliance and others. And their main goal is not to tie themselves with chains to trees and not fight for the Amazon jungle, as many people think. And at home, inform people about how to properly treat nature, why grasses and forest fires should not be allowed to fall. Work is being done with teenagers and young people. They are our future, and who does not remember how he himself burned poplar fluff?

The main task of such organizations is to convince the public that it is impossible to do this, that it is harmful, dangerous and generally “bad”. From this point of view, the situation in our country is virgin.