Some 5.4 million hectares of land are ablaze across Russia, mostly in Siberia and the country's far east. Water sprayed by planes to fight the fires is ‘now as expensive as Champagne’.
Cries to urgently call state of emergency in Irkutsk region as it chokes in smoke.
Even school children are in firefighting brigades in some areas of Yakutia.
The lengthy wildfire season follows a record-hot Arctic summer. People living in Yakutsk are waking up to heavy smog brought from the wildfires raging to the west, east and north; struggling to breathe and with head, eye and throat aches.
Omsk region reported ‘record high’ number of wildfires and cases of dry grass burning, that turn into wildfires this spring, with one day last week counting nearly a thousand new events a day. Omsk region emergency services said the number of wildfires is seven to ten times above the norm.
Wildfires on permafrost are ravaging Yakutia - or the Sakha Republic - the largest and coldest entity of the Russian Federation. The scale is mesmerizing. There are some 300 separate fires, now covering 12,140 square kilometers - but only around half of these are being tackled, because they pose a threat to people. The rest are burning unchecked.
Pillars of smoke were filmed over the areas hit by last summer’s wildfires despite the current long spell of extremely cold weather.
Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk suffering smoke pollution and infernos rage in forests after hot, dry weather.
The fires are now raging some 10 to 15 kilometers from the megaslump crater - a large hole in the frozen Arctic soil which highlights the dramatic speed of thawing permafrost.
Elsewhere in Russia’s coldest region desperate authorities spike clouds to induce rain and tame wildfires.
The wildfire started in a temperature of minus 20C, and is proving hard to extinguish because firemen cannot get water from frozen lakes and rivers. Normally the ground would be under thick snow by this time of year; this November several areas of eastern Russia, like its coldest territory Yakutia, say they are short of snow.
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