16 august 2010

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visits peat bog fire fighting sites in the Moscow Region’s Kolomna

Participants:

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited a shooting range at Konstruktorskoye Byuro Mashinostroyenia on the city's outskirts to see a peat bog flooding experiment. Surrounded with peat bogs, the shooting range was engulfed in a big forest and peat fire in late July.

The prime minister inspected a newly fabricated water supply system that had been laid from the Oka River over five kilometres away. He visited a special reservoir filled with river water to spread across the peat bogs through a network of channels and trenches. This flooding technology is to be used soon in other districts of the Moscow Region.
Vladimir Putin had previously announced that the Russian government had allocated 300 million roubles to fight the peat fires.

Valery Shuvalov, Mayor of Kolomna, said the city's firefighters had started to flood the peat bogs a week ago in cooperation with the Ministry of Civil Defence, Emergencies and Disaster Relief. Although it has been a week since the last open fire was detected, special observers are patrolling the forests around Kolomna. The city remains in a state of emergency and people are not allowed to enter the woods, Shuvalov said.