Once or twice in a lifetime, drought conditions with peat burning are an issue in the UK. Peat is extensive on our hills and mountains above the 1000' contour, and are formed due to our 'wet' climate. They are also a vast recognised natural water reservoir, which needs management. Regularly, heather and such is burnt off our mountains by landowners to encourage new growth to sustain game animals, and the accompanying hunting industry. The peat doesn't catch. I understand regular fires in Chapparal ecology to have the same purpose, but nature there is designed to accommodate and rely on it. There, there isn't peat.
It's all about management and sustainablity. These concepts do not come easily to present Russian society as there is no opportunity to skim 'income' out of it. There is no Forestry Service, and they even sold 2 of their 4 firefighting planes to the west. That leaves 2 planes for whole of the RF.
They are idiots.
From Russian sources, here are 2 articles via Johnson's Russia List of relevance....
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Russian Academic Blames Current Fires On Human Negligence MOSCOW, August 5 (Itar-Tass) -- The current wildland fires should be blamed not so much on bad weather as on human carelessness and negligence, one of the leading Russian experts in the field of environmental protection, deputy director of the Institute of Geography under the Russian Academy of Sciences, Arkady Tishkov, told Itar-Tass.
"We keep hearing that the destruction of entire villages and towns must be blamed on wildfires," he said. "But this is not so. It is true that there were abnormal temperatures at the end of June, in July and in early
August, but the fires we have seen were mostly man-made ones."
According to the scientist, 95 percent of the fires involved human error.
"In each separate case we are quite capable of coping with fires and preventing their emergence," he said. "But in general, they are quite natural in a situation where vast expanses of European Russia are currently overgrown with weeds, where there are abandoned grasslands and pastures, which are pretty close to villages and towns. Hay fields and pastures accumulate huge reserves of dry grass. Their inflammation is only a matter of time."
Virtually all cases of peat fires are also a result of human mismanagement, says the scientist. Excessive drainage, strong dehydration of peat layers, abandoned after extraction, and the lack of fire safety control - all these are factors for the rapid spread of lasting underground fires.
"This year, the level of swamp waters decreased in the summertime by tens of centimeters, and the fire easily spread to the previously flooded peat layers," Tishkov said. "The systems of artificial control of water levels in peatlands in the Moscow, Tver, Ryazan and Vladimir regions are in ruins, and this does not allows for quickly irrigate burning peat."
Global climate change has nothing to do with this, says the expert. High temperatures merely added to the conditions under which fires were likely to develop. No less important were the effects of the forestry reform - from the elimination of the Federal Forest Service and State Committee for Ecology in 2000 to the introduction of the new Forest Code, which led to the elimination of entire sectors of the economy - forestries, the state forest protection, and so on," Tishkov said.
To remedy the situation, said the scientist, it is necessary to restore the forest service, forest fire protection, and government patronage of the forestries. Wherever possible, roadside forest belts must be restored. It is very important, in his opinion, to strictly prohibit the burning of grass.
"This year, instead of plowing and haying, some preferred to burn grass on the fertile lands of the Oka river floodplains. As a result several parts of a local wildlife preserve caught fire."
"The fires, material damage and casualties during the hot summer of 2010 are the first serious alarm call, a warning against the de-ecologization of the economy and society," the expert said. "One must respond correctly, without finding excuses in climate anomalies."
Russia's Forests Burn Due to Firefighting Services Disbanded in Corruption-Based Economy Gazeta
www.gzt.ru August 4, 2010
Article by Stanislav Belkovskiy: "Russia Burns Down, or the End of the ROZ Economy, Part Three"
The ROZ (the author's neologism, standing for "raspil, otkat, zanos" -- cut up, kick back, carry away) economy that now reigns in Russia is distinguished by one important characteristic. It reproduces only systems and structures (governmental and nongovernmental) with a high level of corruption. It scraps everything else. In a ROZ economy, industries and enterprises with a low corruption capacity gradually atrophy and vanish. The most blatant example is the terrible fires that have gripped the country. Stanislav Belkovskiy Stanislav Belkovskiy likes and knows how to shock the public. His texts provoke stormy debates and sometimes even scandals. Belkovskiy knows his way around the political kitchen: he has worked with Russian and Ukrainian politicians as a political strategist. Since 2004 he has headed up the National Strategy Institute. He was chief editor of the Political News Agency and has written several books about well-known politicians.
Suddenly we have learned that modern Russia has virtually no system for warning of or putting out fires. It has vanished. Much as the Kursk submarine drowned. But why did it vanish? Because the firefighting system did not generate the proper corruption motives and stimuli.
It is hard to get a bribe from an unlucky fire victim. Even harder to demand a kickback from the taciturn Russian forest, which slumbers, as does all our history. This forest is going to burn with its last dignity, without contemplating corrupt relations with the people who once emerged from its womb.
What have we learned about Russian firefighting in the last few weeks and days? That in accordance with the new Forest Code, passed in 2006, the state forest service was scrapped.
The burden of averting and putting out forest fires was placed on those leasing the forest. Why? Because in a ROZ economy the forest's leasers wanted to behave basically like its private owners. To do anything they felt like doing with the forest. Anything that yielded money and pleasure.
The old man-forester system hindered this. So it was abolished. As a result, the most important thing -- early warning of fires and notification about them -- became impossible.
They also destroyed the federal forest aviation protection service. Its last viable pieces were transferred to the European Air Squadron, which puts out forest fires in Europe (Italy, Greece, the former Yugoslavia). Why did they do that? So that the Europeans would pay Russia's S. K. Shoygu MChS well for all our various rescuers and firefighters to get involved in their European affairs.
And the money is being transferred . . . transferred . . . mainly transferred to elegant offshores, and no one other than especially exceptional individuals in the leadership of the relevant ministry knows the amounts or where they have been put to use. This is much more profitable than knocking yourself at a fire in an insolvent Russian forest.
One of the most important rules of a ROZ economy is to do only what is financially most advantageous at the given moment in time. Regardless of the consequences for society and the state.
It has also come out that MChS, which since 2001 has been assigned to fight fires, possesses neither the equipment nor the technologies for this. The ministry has at its disposal a total of four (four!) Be-200 fire-extinguishing aircraft.
Production of these planes has ended at the Irkutsk aviation plant, and they have not begun to think about starting it up at the Taganrog plant. As a result, th e MChS cannot get new Be-200s before 2012. (And with us, "not before" almost always means "after.") Consequently, if we were told that two Be-200 airplanes were put into operation to avert a fire at the Nuclear Center in Sarov, then at that moment there were only two other airplanes left for all the rest of the country.
In all its firefighting years, MChS has shown zero interest in Russian scientific-technical developments with respect to firefighting. For example, the ASP-500 fire-extinguishing bomb, which is capable of putting out a powerful fire over an area of 1000 square meters.
Or for the method of Perm Professor Vladimir Sretenskiy, who back in 1990, under Soviet power, patented a technique for the efficient, low-cost extinguishing of peat fires. At the center of Sretenskiy's technique is one ordinary domestic-made bulldozer such as we have in Russia in abundance.
Evidently, the corruption capacity of instituting these kinds of developments was obviously insufficient to attract attention from the ROZ economy.
Nor did Russian state firefighters read the report from the RAN (Russian Academy of Sciences) Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, which predicted that the first drought summer would subject the country to a fire collapse. No one was interested.
On the other hand, the most primitive visit to the official state purchasing site allows us to learn that lately MChS has gone on a spree purchasing luxury and semi-luxury automobiles.
For instance, a Toyota Land Cruiser was bought for the Nizhniy Novgorod fire service for R2.2 million. One other entertainment for those at MChS has been all kinds of research-marketing-monitoring jobs. This is a favorite channel for cutting up and kicking back in a ROZ economy.
Toyota Land Cruiser
In 2009 they spent nearly R2.5 million on "research into modern domestic and foreign examples of equipment and technologies in the area of ensuring comprehensive safety for the formation of the Russian MChS exhibition at the International Salon of Security Means -- 2009." Do you understand what this is about?
Also acquired was R7 million for "monitoring of the social effectiveness of implementing the Program's measures and development to improve their social effectiveness and a specialized volume on the results of implementation." What Program they're talking about -- a party program or a television program -- is not at all clear. On the other hand, it is clear that in 2010 three times more was spent on these same needs, i.e., R21 million.
MChS is planning to spend approximately R230 million this year to improve its Russia-wide system for informing the population. These expenditures are fully justified, actually. The history of fires has shown that as of today there has been practically no informing system at all. And what ever happened to the R225 million allocated for this last year is not entirely clear.
Although -- let us have pity on fire victims, present and future, not MChS. A Russia-wide fire would give this department a boost toward its further adornment. Right now, when we know for certain that Russia lacks a system for fighting fires, the standard reaction for a ROZ economy will probably be set in motion. If something isn't working somewhere, that something has to have a huge infusion of state funds. Enough for everyone.
The day is nigh when, after breaking through the unbearable smoke of our federal smog (remember the banal, now true joke: How is it there in London? There's smog in London. It would be better if you could at home! (a joke based on "smog's" second meaning, in Russian, of "could")) and having regurgitated the rest of the fire's sulfur, Russia's MChS leadership will write a letter to the Russian government calling for, demanding, that they urgently alloc ate R100 billion to create an ultra-modern system of fire prevention and disaster cleanup. It can be done in installments, but it has to be done right away.
In parallel, the Russian MVD (Interior Ministry) will go to the Russian government with the exact same request. For R100 billion. Having indicated that the MChS has already hopelessly blown the fight against the fires, which means that the ultramodern firefighting center (UTsO) should be created under the Interior Ministry.
A state corporation in the form of the S. V. Chemezov Russian Technologies noncommercial organization is going to make the same request. For R100 billion. Inasmuch as all ultramodern firefighting technologies are concentrated in that state corporation's enterprises. Which means the UTsO should be created within its framework.
TNK-VP (Tyumen Oil Company-British Petroleum) open joint-stock oil and gas company is going to go to the Russian government, too. For R100 billion. Because only BP possesses unique experience putting out fires. On an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. If these technologies are transferred to Russian soil, there will not be any more fires in Russia. Ever. Consequently, the UTsO should be joint-stock and under TNK-BP management.
If something similar had happened at the height of the ROZ economy, events would have developed approximately this way. They would have allocated R75 billion, not R100 billion, from the budget. Of this, R25 billion would have been stolen and an UTsO would have been built for 50 billion. With some degree of effectiveness.
Now, however, at the finish of the ROZ economy, everything is going to be different. They are going to allocate not the requested 100 but more, something like R137 billion. Because in the process of examining the issue in the government and Kremlin new interests will turn up who also have needs. Then R117 billion will be stolen. And for 20 billion they will build the UTsO central office and hold its launch.
After that it can all burn with a blue flame.
As Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova once said, though, we will not lose our despair.
After all, another R10 billion from the federal budget will be allocated to facilitate prayer events for the purpose of preventing fires and sending down rain. This money will go to an independent consortium made up of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (RPTs MP), a public religious organization, and individual entrepreneur N. S. Mikhalkov.
The main channels for spending the funds (R10 billion):
R2.8 billion for the publication of a special anti-fire prayer book for all Russians; print run of 280 million copies, two copies per Russian capita -- if one prayer book burns up in a fire, the second should survive;
R2.8 billion for RPTs MP prayer services (R20 per Russian soul);
R1.4 billion for the prayer services of N. S. Mikhalkov (R10 per Russian soul, practically dumping);
R3 billion for the organization of a Russia-wide Orthodox bike-trike show, Hells Angels Against Fire; the show's front man being Russian Prime Minister V. V. Putin (pending his agreement).
We will pray. There is no other way out (of the ROZ economy) anyway.
