Smog chokes Moscow amid record heat wave

As peat fires raged on the outskirts of town, shrouding Moscow in a thick cloud of smog, residents Wednesday sought to cope with a record-breaking heat wave that is expected to intensify further.

Public health officials urged workers in non-essential jobs to stay home and people not to drive their cars as weather forecasters predicted temperatures exceeding 102 degrees Thursday, in a city more used to icy spells than such heat.

With more than 1,480 fires in two weeks, the smog level had soared to as high as 10 times the safe level in parts of Moscow.

The nation’s chief sanitary inspector, Dr. Gennady Onishchenko, has advised city dwellers to wet their window screens to block harmful substances in the air from entering their homes.

Muscovites have taken to unorthodox methods to deal with the heat in a city with little air conditioning.

“I sit at work sweating like a pig and meekly watching the clock,” said mathematician Andrey Razumovsky, who is employed at an academic institute. “But when I come home I can’t sleep either because of the high temperature inside.

“Last night I went to sleep at 4 in the morning only after I covered myself with a wet bed sheet, which was dry by the time I woke up at 7 a.m.,” he said.

The heat wave, already more than a month long across western and central Russia, has set one record after another as temperatures hover between 96 and 99 degrees. Wednesday marked the fifth consecutive day that Moscow was engulfed in a heavy cloud of whitish, smelly smog.

“The average monthly temperature for the month of July in Moscow The average temperature this month in Moscow “is 8 degrees higher, which is an incredible figure,” Dmitry Kiktyov, deputy chief of Gidromettsentr, the Russian state weather agency, said in a telephone interview. “And this is very, very bad for people’s health, crops, fresh water replenishment and fire situation.”

Nowhere is that situation worse than in villages such as Vyalki, 10 miles southeast of Moscow, where peat fires have consumed forests and villagers, with little help from authorities, have been trying to save their homes and property.

Valentina Yusheva, 51, said she was awakened early Monday by the thick smell of smoke in the sweltering heat.

Yusheva said she panicked when she saw a thick pillar of black smoke rising from a birch grove on a former peat bog on the edge of a cemetery 200 yards from her home.

She called the fire department and got no answer, so she and her next-door neighbor armed themselves with garden spades and began digging a trench.

“Soon other villagers joined us with various garden tools in their hands and we began to dig the trench separating the cemetery from the birch grove under which a mass of peat was burning,” said Yusheva, lanky, with bright eyes and a deep tan. “We were sweating and coughing and the heat coming up from underneath was intolerable but we were still digging.”

“We knew that at that moment no one will protect our families but us,” said Yusheva. At one point she was almost struck by a falling tree.

On Tuesday, a dozen firefighters finally showed up from the regional capital of Kaluga, southwest of Moscow.

“If these brave men hadn’t arrived in time, Rodniki, Vyalki and other villages and towns in the vicinity would have suffocated in smoke by now,” said Vadim Primak, mayor of the neighboring town of Rodniki, who had called friends in Kaluga to plead for a fire crew.

A new fire emerged Wednesday several hundred yards away in the dried-out forest along the Moscow-Yegoryevsk highway. A bulldozer was used to dig long trenches while firefighters shot water toward the flames that had reached the crowns of tall pines.

“One truck can carry three tons of water and it lasts in this fire about 10 minutes,” said firefighter Yevgeny Yevteyev, nearly collapsing with fatigue in the heat. “It is a very difficult fire and we are exhausted working without relief for more than 24 hours already.”

sergei.loiko@latimes.com