Perilous Times and Climate Change
Fire Storm: Planes diverted and offices close as Moscow chokes in Smoke
and Ash
The Kremlin wall is seen through heavy smog, caused by peat fires in
nearby forests, in Moscow, August 6, 2010.
Fri Aug 6, 2010 6:28am EDT
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Planes were diverted from Moscow airports on Friday
after huge peat and forest fires blanketed the capital in acrid smoke,
forcing some businesses to close and office workers to wear surgical
masks at their desks.
Pollution surged to five times normal levels in the city of 10.5
million, the highest sustained contamination since Russia's worst
heatwave in more than a century began a month ago. Officials urged
Muscovites to not venture outdoors.
"Looking at the overall duration (of the pollution), today's smoke
level is the worst yet," said Alexei Popikov, an expert on air quality
at Moscow's state-run pollution monitoring agency.
The famous onion domes of St Basil's cathedral were not visible from
the other end of Red Square on Friday morning because of the dense
smoke. NASA satellite images showed a 3,000 km-long (1,850 mile) smoke
cloud covering European Russia.
The deadliest wildfires in nearly four decades have killed at least 50
people and left thousands homeless as entire villages of wooden houses
burned down. Russia has also announced a temporary ban on grain exports
after crops were ravaged.
Despite a huge effort involving 150,000 people fighting fires,
authorities appeared to be losing the battle.
The size of peat fires burning in the Moscow region almost doubled from
37.5 hectares on Thursday to 65.7 hectares on Friday, the regional
branch of the Emergencies Ministry said on its website.
The emergency has prompted the country's enfeebled opposition to
complain of poor fire safety readiness and a slow, inefficient
government response.
AIRCRAFT DIVERTED
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has toured fire-stricken regions
promising generous compensation to residents and ordering officials to
step up efforts to extinguish the blazes.
The government has warned that the blazes could pose a nuclear threat
by releasing into the atmosphere radioactive particles buried in trees
and plants from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
The smoke will not clear for at least three days, according to Fobos
weather agency, which provides forecasts for some of Russia's largest
media outlets. Moscow temperatures reached 33 Celsius (91 Fahrenheit)
on Friday and have touched the high 30s.
A spokeswoman for Russia's biggest airport Domodedovo said 15 planes
had been diverted to other airports in Russia after visibility fell to
around 400 meters. She said it was up to the crew to decide whether to
land.
Russia's aviation authority said at least 60 planes had been diverted
to as far away as Ukraine from Moscow's busy airports. Flights and
trains out of Moscow were booked solid as residents tried to flee the
smoke.
Employees in offices across Moscow were being sent home as the
oppressive, thick smoke filtered into buildings. A spokesman for
Russia's no. 1 retailer X5 said all 1,500 staff were ordered home.
"I can smell smoke right here in the office," an employee at a
mid-sized Russian bank, speaking on condition of anonymity, told
Reuters. A trader in another medium-sized bank said smoke had entered
the building and that staff had been given permission to leave.
Employees at several businesses which use couriers and on-foot delivery
men told Reuters they were reluctant to process small orders on Friday
as they did not want to step outside.
"My head aches, I feel nausea and I'm scared for my 83-year-old mother,
who feels really bad," said 50-year-old businesswoman Marina Orlova.
Many Muscovites sent their families out of the city to stay at summer
residences in the countryside. Although the smoke affected many of
these, residents said air quality was still better because of the lack
of vehicle pollution.
(Additional reporting by Alexei Anishchuk, Nastassia Astrasheuskaya,
Maria Plis, Dmitry Sergeyev, Andrey Ostroukh, writing by Amie
Ferris-Rotman and Michael Stott, Editing by Alison Williams)