So Serg, did someone flick a cigarette butt out the window and it started all of Moscow on fire? Or maybe it was Globull warming. The earth got so hot in Moscow that it started on fire! You know, burning peat moss is bad for your health. Was this why they sent you to Italy? I thought they sent people to Serbian gulags for this kind of stuff. oke: I'm just teasing. I'm not purposely being mean or making light of this thing. It's pretty freaking bad. They said the peat fires can cause nuclear radiation fallout from when Chernobyl melted down! Man, I would just move out of Moscow before the Fallout 3 game becomes a reality over there. I do think it's kind of odd however that the last statement in the article says the air is still better now because there's no vehicle pollution. Burning radiation is better for you than vehicle exhaust?! WTF?! I can see the smoke has affected the reporters already! Pollution levels soar as smoke blankets Russia Planes diverted, workers sent home as 1,850-mile cloud descends on capital By Amie Ferris-Rotman and Conor Humphries updated 8/6/2010 7:13:00 AM ET MOSCOW — Planes were diverted from Moscow airports on Friday after huge peat and forest fires blanketed the capital in acrid smoke, forcing some businesses to close and office workers to wear surgical masks at their desks. Pollution surged to five times normal levels in the city of 10.5 million, the highest sustained contamination since Russia's worst heat wave in more than a century began a month ago. Officials urged Muscovites to not venture outdoors. "Looking at the overall duration (of the pollution), today's smoke level is the worst yet," said Alexei Popikov, an expert on air quality at Moscow's state-run pollution monitoring agency. The famous onion domes of St Basil's cathedral were not visible from the other end of Red Square Friday morning because of the dense smoke. NASA satellite images showed a 1,850-mile smoke cloud covering European Russia. The deadliest wildfires in nearly four decades have killed at least 50 people and left thousands homeless as entire villages of wooden houses burned down. Russia has also announced a temporary ban on grain exports after crops were ravaged. Despite a huge effort involving 150,000 people fighting fires, authorities appeared to be losing the battle. The size of peat fires burning in the Moscow region almost doubled from 92 acres Thursday to 162 acres hectares Friday, the regional branch of the Emergencies Ministry said on its website. The emergency has prompted the country's enfeebled opposition to complain of poor fire safety readiness and a slow, inefficient government response. Nuclear threat Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has toured fire-stricken regions promising generous compensation to residents and ordering officials to step up efforts to extinguish the blazes. The government has warned that the blazes could pose a nuclear threat by releasing into the atmosphere radioactive particles buried in trees and plants from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The smoke will not clear for at least three days, according to Fobos weather agency, which provides forecasts for some of Russia's largest media outlets. Moscow temperatures reached 91 degrees Friday. A spokeswoman for Domodedovo, Russia's biggest airport, said 15 planes had been diverted to other airports in Russia after visibility fell to around 1,300 feet. She said it was up to the crew to decide whether to land. Russia's aviation authority said at least 60 planes had been diverted to as far away as Ukraine from Moscow's busy airports. Flights and trains out of Moscow were booked solid as residents tried to flee the smoke. Employees in offices across Moscow were being sent home as the oppressive, thick smoke filtered into buildings. A spokesman for Russia's no. 1 retailer X5 said all 1,500 staff were ordered home. "I can smell smoke right here in the office," an employee at a mid-sized Russian bank, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. A trader in another medium-sized bank said smoke had entered the building and that staff had been given permission to leave. Employees at several businesses which use couriers and on-foot delivery men told Reuters they were reluctant to process small orders on Friday as they did not want to step outside. "My head aches, I feel nausea and I'm scared for my 83-year-old mother, who feels really bad," said 50-year-old businesswoman Marina Orlova. Many Muscovites sent their families out of the city to stay at summer residences in the countryside. Although the smoke affected many of these, residents said air quality was still better because of the lack of vehicle pollution.
Well I guess every cloud has a silver lining. I worked on a fire crew one summer my dream was to stop a Greyhound bus and draft all the passangers into an emergency fire fighting crew but it never happened. I did spend a day flying around in a beaver floatplane looking for smoke from a fire someone reported on a island. The beaver is a light canvas covered plane . I was sitting on 2 gas cans used to fuel the pump. The cockpit was full of fumes, the pilot was an old timer would didn't worry about things such as the habit of gasoline vapour has of igniting in the presence of an open flame and chain smoked the whole time. All I could think of was how it would look from the ground as the plane exploded in a fireball.
We regularly have this happen in Houston when the Mexican farmers burn off their fields in the Yucatan. It usually just means hazy days.
Well, central part of Russia is on fire indeed. Heavy smoke fills the air for 1,5 weeks already almost everyday. I sit at my apartments with windows closed. Very unfortunate. And there are some reasons for this to happen - the primary one is total destruction of USSR's forest protection system by the governments of "New Russia". The secondary reason is, of course, the stupidity of population (some part of it, at least), because 90..95% of fires are caused by people. The article does not mention it, but death rate in hospitals and among aged people in smoke-covered regions increased at least 10%, due to smoke and CO air pollution (or so the radio said today). I can not understand why article states, that there is no vehicle air pollution, it always "is" in Moscow and, unfortunately, often in my town too. But, there is a positive side to this: some scientist point out, that fine dust in atmosphere deflects Sun rays, thus helping reduce global warming. And all those fires produce a lot of dust. This is the way ecosystem fights global warming. Also, reducing number of people reduces energy consumption, thus reducing the cause of global warming too. However, this second part is not that appealing...
Ya, but it's not just fire, it's nuclear fire. All the toxic waste that the ground soaked up from Chernobyl is being burned and given flight!
I would add that ANYthing that we cockroaches do can be easily corrected by the extinction of our species.
Will you marry me?:heart: We can now get married in California. I never realized we had so much in common! Think of all the time wasted!
We're good, but we are NOT that good. A complicated organism perched precariously at the top of the food chain is more fragile as a species than microorganisms, insects, etc. My money is on the cockroaches and the rats.
I think you've both got with the program now. Finally! First, we kill every living thing in our galaxy, then we war ourselves into extinction.
A small update on Russia's fire, smoke and heat situation. It turns out, that death rate in affected areas did not increase by 10%...20%. It simply DOUBLED. (Or so the radio reported today.)
