The government has specified who should be responsible for wildfires

The Russian government has approved levels of response to landscape fires. It is now regulated how, depending on the time that has passed since the discovery of a fire, responsibility for its elimination will pass from municipal to regional and ultimately to federal authorities. Experts note that the introduction of standards will help create a system in matters of responsibility for extinguishing fires, but add that the document may conflict with existing regulations.

Starting from the new year, a decree of the Russian government comes into force, establishing levels of response to landscape (natural) fires. According to the new rules, outbreaks that have arisen on the territories of municipalities (but not on the lands of the forest fund, defense and security and protected areas) must be controlled at the municipal level. But after 24 hours, if the fire is not localized, regional authorities should take control of the situation. After 72 hours, the fire is assigned a federal response level. “If after 168 hours the fire continues to spread, the government commission for the prevention and response to emergency situations and ensuring fire safety is involved in organizing its extinguishing,” the document says.

If there is a threat to a populated area or an important infrastructure facility, the level of response increases without taking into account the time that has passed since the discovery of a natural fire.

The document was developed by the Ministry of Emergency Situations. The department explained that “the resolution will make it possible to more effectively coordinate the actions of governing bodies and forces of federal executive bodies, executive bodies of constituent entities of the Russian Federation, local governments, as well as quickly make the necessary decisions when organizing work to eliminate landscape (natural) fires.”

“The initiative itself is correct,” says Grigory Kuksin, founder of the Center for the Prevention of Landscape Fires, “but it has not been discussed with the expert community.” Mr. Kuksin suggested that the resolution may conflict with existing regulations, including the law “on the protection of the population and territories from emergency situations” (68-FZ) and fire extinguishing rules.

Separately, the expert is concerned that frequent changes in the level responsible for extinguishing a fire could lead to “confusion on the ground”: “The head of the extinguishing operation will have to coordinate his actions with various higher-ranking officials, and in the end this may lead to delays and loss of time.”

“If you have to resolve the issue at such a high level, it means that local acts in the regions and among specialists are insufficient, and interdepartmental interaction has not been established,” Konstantin Kobyakov, an expert in the field of extinguishing wildfires, commented on the initiative. The expert believes that the new rules will help solve the problem with agricultural and reserve lands, responsibility for which was constantly transferred by authorities at different levels to each other. Mr. Kobyakov draws attention to the fact that the latest innovations in the field of fire fighting give municipalities more and more responsibility, “but they do not add the necessary material and technical resources to the powers.”

Director of the voluntary certification system “Forest Standard” Nikolai Shmatkov notes that the situation with the fires, the smoke from which covered Moscow in the summer of 2010, was caused precisely by the lack of such legislation. “No one was responsible for the areas where the fires arose, and as a result, the fires were not extinguished in time,” the expert argues. Nevertheless, “it is premature to talk about the effectiveness of such measures,” says Mr. Shmatkov: “We will only be able to understand how this is implemented in practice in the spring; the wildfire season begins in May.”

Polina Yachmennikova