Six Countries Send Help to Russian Firefighters

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Firefighters in Russia are battling almost 600 fires, the largest number of fires the country has seen in nearly 40 years. Thursday help arrived from other countries in the form of aircraft, fire trucks and personnel from Italy and five former Soviet republics as the fire death toll rose to 50, according to the Moscow Times. Three Italian jets arrived in Moscow late Thursday afternoon, will fight fires in the Moscow region. Two Armenian jets with four water pumps were sent to the Nizhny Novgorod region. Two Azeri jets were assigned to the Lipetsk region and two Kazakh helicopters will help firefighters in the Samara region, according to the Times.  Two firefighting units from the Ukraine joined two Ukrainian An-32 jets in the Voronezh region. Belarus sent 150 firefighters and a helicopter to the Ryazan and Vladimir regions and promised 20 firefighting vehicles. Germany, Poland, Bulgaria have offered their assistance and Finnish firefighters are standing by as the fires burn toward their country's border. A Russian military garrison southwest of Moscow moved all its artillery rockets to a safer location because of the fires, according to the Associated Press. According to a Defense Ministry spokesman, the garrison was not in immediate danger. The decision may have been made because of a fire last week that caused substantial damage to a Russian naval air base outside of Moscow. Russian media reported as many as 200 planes may have been destroyed. In the country's central and western region, nearly 2,000 homes have been destroyed. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has promised to build new, better homes before winter. According to AP, Putin also said each victim would receive $6,600 a huge sum where the average monthly wage is $800. Meanwhile the Russian media reported, some residents may have torched their own homes to qualify for the government compensation. Thick smog has been blanketing Moscow because of all the fires and temperatures reaching up to 100 degrees where the average temperature is usually around 75 degrees. The forecast for the region shows little change in temperature, for this, the hottest summer on record, according to Reuters. Flames were stopped near a top-secret nuclear research facility, the Russian Federal Nuclear Research Center in the city of Sarov. According to AP, as a precaution all hazardous materials had been evacuated but on Wednesday, officials denied the fire and said the closest blaze was still several miles away. According to Reuters, Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu said heat from fires in the Bryansk region, which already has nuclear contamination from the Chernobyl disaster more than 20 years ago, could release harmful radioactive particles into the atmosphere."In the event of a fire there, radionuclides could rise (into the air) together with combustion particles, resulting in a new pollution zone," he said on state television, without going into detail.
Author:Barbara Brooks - Fire Department Network News