Fires claim 20 lives and destroy villages

FOREST fires raged across Russia yesterday, destroying villages, surrounding one southern city and killing at least 20 people, including three firefighters.

The fires have spread quickly across more than 200,000 acres in recent days after a record heat wave and severe drought that has plagued Russia for weeks. Fields and forests have dried up, and much of this year’s wheat harvest is ruined.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the smouldering ruins of Verkhnyaya Vereya, where all 341 houses were burned to the ground and two resident died in the blaze. The village was one of three destroyed around Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth-largest city located 475 kilometres east of Moscow.

“Before winter, each house will be restored,” Putin told a crowd of distressed villagers, most of them women. “I promise – the village will be rebuilt.”

One weeping woman thanked him for his “serious talk” and promises of compensation of 200,000 rubles (€5,000) for each villager, and Putin kissed her on the cheek.

The fires in the Voronezh, Nizhny Novogorod and Moscow regions have destroyed more than 1,000 houses and left more than 2,000 people homeless, according to the country’s Emergencies Ministry.

The streets of Voronezh were filled with smog yesterday and a giant wall of rising black smoke could be seen on the horizon, television footage showed.

More than 900 patients had to be hurriedly transferred out of a Voronezh hospital on Thursday and nearly 2,000 children were evacuated from 12 summer camps in the path of the flames.

At least 20 people have died in the past two days from the forest fires, according to officials. The toll includes five people, including one firefighter, in Voronezh, and six residents and a firefighter who died when a fire swept through the Mokhovoe village in the Moscow region on Thursday. The other deaths were in the Nizhny Novgorod and Lipetsk regions.

July has been the hottest in Moscow in 130 years of recorded history. The mercury hit 37.8C on Thursday, setting a new record. A high of 32C was forecast for yesterday.

Putin yesterday urged local officials to step up their emergency operations to defeat the fires. “The situation in these regions deteriorated yesterday, we need to take some urgent steps,” he said at a meeting. He also said local officials who had failed to stop the fires in their regions should resign.

Prosecutors will “thoroughly investigate and evaluate each official,” he said.

Meanwhile in northern Los Angeles County, firefighters planned an aggressive air attack against a fast-moving wildfire that exploded, chewing through more than 7 square miles of dry brush, forcing thousands of evacuations and burning at least three structures.

Three water-dropping helicopters and hundreds of firefighters worked through the night to get ahead of the blaze that broke out about 3pm on Thursday southwest of Palmdale. By early evening the winds picked up and pushed the flames north and east toward the suburbs of Los Angeles County’s inland desert, authorities said.

The fire broke out north of a state highway that snakes through the San Gabriel Mountains, connecting LA to the desert.

Further north, good weather helped firefighters build containment lines around two wildfires that destroyed homes in mountain communities earlier in the week.