‘Everything is on fire’: Siberia hit by unprecedented burning | Hacker News Reader

‘Everything is on fire’: Siberia hit by unprecedented burning

theguardian.com

42 pointsmontalbano14 comments

USSR spent a lot of resources to prevent wood fires, plenty of people worked on that. Russia significantly cut all investitions to that area, infrastructure is aging, people are untrained, corrupted and there are few of them. It's not a surprise that those fires every year are getting bigger. It'll get worse with time.

Another contributing factor is wood stealing. High-ranked officials are selling wood illegally, mostly to China and then covering missing wood with fires.

Also some laws are outright stupid. In the past local people were gathering fallen trees. Recently there were some laws which made this practice much harder, some people were even convicted for that. So people stopped to gather fallen trees. And fallen trees is another contributing factor which increases chance of putting forest on fire.

frustrating

>Another contributing factor is wood stealing. High-ranked officials are selling wood illegally, mostly to China and then covering missing wood with fires.

source?

https://earthsight.org.uk/ikeahouseofhorrors

It's an enormous business, and many of the big players in Russia are very wealthy and certainly have close ties to the ruling class in that country.

I would wager that a lot of this wood is also being used to make Chinese 'stencil' pianos; China is the only location where piano manufacturing is still growing

I suppose it's cold comfort for Americans in the West who've been dealing with the second year running of record fire seasons that the Russians also mismanaged their forests into rampant wildfires.

Do they not sell rakes in Russia? /s

And Australia? And multiple state and federal fires in the US?

Maybe there is a common underlying cause that isn't just "mismanagement"?

Fire requires three things: heat, fuel, and an oxidizer (usually the air).

While climate change definitely is bringing the heat to the party, mismanagement of forests is providing the fuel. For the longest time we ignored the fact that small fires eliminate the fuel that big fires need to spread and diligently put them all out.

I wish people would justify their down votes with some comment. This poster is pointing to a pretty valuable part of this discussion and is down voted with no reason?

Just want to add that climate change doesn't simply add heat, it also often disrupts weather patterns which can cause more drought--and that's arguably more dangerous than just warmer weather.

As a bonus, it can dry and warm the permafrost paving the way for extremely hard to control peat fires.

And meanwhile Putin sends their firefighter planes... to Turkey and Greece. https://www.dw.com/en/russia-sends-military-aircraft-to-figh...

Oregon's fire helicopters were in Afghanistan if that helps.

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