Russia (bbabo.net), - The leadership of Yakutia has achieved a significant increase in funding for forest protection. In 2022, the republic will receive 1.6 billion rubles from the federal budget for these purposes - 5.5 times more than was allocated for this year. This kind of money has never been dealt with in the region, and now local authorities are deciding how to get the most out of it.

Every year, at the end of the fire season, calculations were sent to Moscow proving that it was impossible to effectively protect huge forests, receiving funds for this at the lowest rate in the country. The most convincing argument was the past summer, when the smell of smoke from the burning Yakut taiga was felt in other regions of Russia and even beyond its borders, and the Yakuts themselves hardly saw the sun for several months. And this despite the fact that paratroopers from all over the country, as well as the most powerful aviation group of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the Ministry of Defense, helped local firefighters to extinguish the hearths.

As a result, the area of ​​forest fires in Yakutia exceeded eight million hectares (in Russia as a whole - just over ten million hectares). According to the republican prosecutor's office, the damage to the forest fund in the region amounted to 3.7 billion rubles. This is not counting funds for the restoration of power lines destroyed by fire, communication lines, residential buildings in the village of Byas-Kyuel, for compensation for burnt property and livestock.

- The complexity of the fire hazardous season of 2021 was due to many factors, including the lack of forces and means of forest fire units to eliminate fires in such a large area, - says the prosecutor of the republic Maxim Popov.

The echoes of this failure are still evident. 4.4 thousand people mobilized to fight the fire, by the last decade of December, did not receive their due payments in the total amount of 184 million rubles.

There will be money in the coming year. According to the head of the republic, Aisen Nikolaev, the allocated funds will be enough to increase the frequency of air patrolling of forests three times, ground patrolling eight times. The number of paratroopers will be almost doubled.

- But going along the old path, only by increasing funding and the number of employees, is definitely not a way out of the situation. The system of extinguishing forest fires itself is ineffective, and everyone knows this very well. Without a detailed analysis of what happened, we will not achieve anything, - said Nikolaev.

This summer, even near settlements, many small foci that could be extinguished in the bud did not go unnoticed - they did not react to them in time. And then they had to save the villages that were in the ring of fire. The government of Yakutia has been instructed to analyze all the mistakes and build a system of relations between state authorities, municipalities, emergency services and specialized organizations, which would allow the maximum number of fires to be eliminated in the first day from the moment of detection until they have grown to hundreds of thousands of hectares.

Aisen Nikolaev also ordered to expand the mineralized strips around the settlements to which the forest adjoins to one hundred meters. Because of the heat and winds, fires often turned into riding ones and easily jumped even over 30-meter barriers.

There are no weather forecasts for the coming summer, but every year it is getting hotter in Yakutia and it rains less and less. It is the thunderstorm fronts passing over the arid territories without precipitation that become the main cause of fires. According to the calculations of the republican prosecutor's office, in the past year, only in 81 cases the forest caught fire due to careless handling of fire or the unsatisfactory condition of power lines. And more than 1.4 thousand fires were caused by dry thunderstorms.

In the spring, one more factor may be added to this natural factor. In several districts, local residents discovered that smoke emanated from under the yellowed snow in the 40-degree frost. In these places the fire went underground, peat smolders there. According to Trofim Maksimov, Deputy Chairman of the Yakutsk Scientific Center of the SB RAS, such foci can operate for a long time, and in the future year-round "zombie fires" are possible in the region.

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