Wildfires destroy forests

MOSCOW, Russia (AP):

A devastating wave of wildfires across Russia could ravage millions of acres of forests and cause worse damage than last year's catastrophic forest and peat-bog fires, environmentalists and officials said yesterday.

"We're burning, burning badly," Greenpeace's forestry expert, Alexey Yaroshenko, said. "This year's situation is already much worse than last year's."

In 2010, an unprecedented heat-wave triggered fires that killed 55 people, destroyed thousands of houses and 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres) of forests, an area slightly larger than Oregon.

This year, three firefighters have died, and dozens of wildfires have already engulfed more than 600,000 hectares (1.48 million acres) of forests, nearly three times more territory than this time last year, the Emergencies Ministry reported.

Greenpeace claimed that the government is silencing information about fires, especially about the renewal of peat-bog fires around Moscow that cloaked the capital with acrid, toxic smoke last year.

"There are dozens of them around Moscow," Greenpeace's Grigory Kuksin told journalists. "It's technically impossible to put out some of them already."