AFP UK

Turkish coastguards evacuated hundreds of villagers from a burning power plant on Thursday and Greek firefighters battled a major blaze near the ancient Olympic site as a record heatwave wrecked havoc across Europe’s southeast.

The two regional rivals have been united this week in their fight against disasters that officials and experts link to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.

Eight people have died and dozens have been hospitalised across the southern coasts of Turkey since the wildfires erupted last week.

The blazes in Greece this week briefly cut off the main road leading to Athens and saw worrying fires break out in Olympia — the birthplace of the Olympic Games that is usually crowded with tourists — and on the island of Evia.

Greece deployed large forces near Olympia to protect archeological sites where the first Olympic Games were held in antiquity.

“We’re waging a battle of the titans!” Greek deputy minister for civil protection Nikos Hardalias said.

But perhaps the biggest shock came when winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tonnes of coal.

– ‘Where could we go?’ –

An AFP team saw firefighters and police fleeing the 35-year-old Kemerkoy plant in the Aegean province of Mugla as bright balls of orange flames tore through the surrounding hills.

Hundreds of villagers — many clutching small bags of belongings grabbed from their abandoned houses as the evacuation call sounded — piled onto coastguard speedboats at the nearby port of Oren.

The regional authority said “all explosive chemicals” and other hazardous material had been removed from the strategic site.

“But there’s a risk that the fire could spread to the thousands of tonnes of coal inside,” regional mayor Osman Gurun told reporters.

A few older villagers in Oren refused to leave the disaster-hit region even while thousands of others were shuttled out by car or boats racing along the Aegean Sea.

“Where do you want us to go at our age?” asked 79-year-old Hulusi Kinic.

“We live here. This is our home. Our last solution was to throw ourselves in the sea (if there was an explosion), but thank God that did not happen.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s office said an initial inspection showed the overnight blazes left “no serious damage to the main units in the plant”.

– ‘Asking for reinforcements’ –

More than 100 blazes were still burning in Greece and 180 have ignited in Turkey since July 28 — more than a dozen of them still active on Wednesday night.

The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said July was the second-hottest on record in Europe.

Greece’s Hardalias said earlier this week that the ferocity of the fires ravaging the region meant that “we are no longer talking about climate change but a climate threat”.

The unfolding disasters saw the leaders of both countries come under pressure from local officials for what they felt was an insufficiently resolute response.

“We are asking the authorities to reinforce the air and land forces to so as not to risk human lives,” Limni mayor Giorgos Tsapourniotis told Greece’s ANA news agency.

The Turkish mayor of the town of Milas spent days waging a social media campaign trying to get officials to send firefighting planes that could douse the flames before they engulfed the power plant.

– Erdogan on the defensive –

Erdogan has come under especially withering criticism for being slow or unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.

The crisis has posed an unexpected challenge to the powerful Turkish leader two years before he faces an election that could extend his rule into a third decade.

Erdogan tried to mount a political counterattack in a television interview Wednesday that began just as news broke that the fire had reached the Aegean power plant.

“When fires break out in America or Russia, (the opposition) stands by the government, We don’t have this,” Erdogan said.

The prosecutors’ office in Ankara said Thursday it has launched an investigation into social media posts about the fire that were “trying to create anxiety, fear and panic in the public, and to humiliate the Turkish government”.

President Joe Biden will set a target on Thursday that half of all cars sold in the United States by 2030 will be zero-emission vehicles, the White House announced.

Biden’s plan follows the dramatic loosening of many environmental regulations and climate protections under the Donald Trump administration.

“The President will sign an Executive Order that sets an ambitious new target to make half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 zero-emissions vehicles, including battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, or fuel cell electric vehicles,” a White House statement said.

The order, due to be signed on Thursday, will position “America to drive the electric vehicle future forward, outcompete China, and tackle the climate crisis,” it added.

The three big American auto manufacturers — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — expressed their “shared aspiration to achieve sales of 40-50%” of electric vehicles including battery electric, fuel cell and plug-in hybrid vehicles by 2030.

In another statement, the manufacturers BMW, Honda, Volkswagon and Volvo — whose electric vehicles are often considered more advanced than their US competitors — applauded the initiative.

– Union support –

One of America’s largest unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), rallied behind the move. 

“The members of the UAW, current and future, are ready to build these electric cars and trucks and the batteries that go in them,” President Ray Curry said in a statement released through the White House.

“Our members are America’s secret weapon in winning this global race.”

Although the 50 percent figure would not exceed what many American manufacturers were already considering, it is a steep target for the United States as a whole.

The country is home to Tesla, a world leader in electric cars, but it has been slow to adopt such vehicles — especially compared with China or Europe.

While around 10 percent of European car sales are of electric vehicles, they account for less than two percent in the United States, according to the International Energy Agency in 2020.

Biden also intends to beef up fuel consumption and emission regulations, which had been dramatically rolled back under his predecessor Trump.

Car emissions are the single biggest US contributor to climate change.

The current emissions regulations, which date from March 2020, require manufacturers to improve by 1.5 percent the energy efficiency of their vehicles between 2021 and 2026 — compared with the five percent demanded by the Obama administration.

The Biden administration did not immediately unveil a new quantified objective.

Greek firefighters battled Thursday to bring under control two major fires raging near Olympia and on the island of Evia as the country swelters in a record-breaking heatwave.

More than 170 firefighters, around 50 trucks, six helicopters and water-bombing aircraft were deployed near the ancient archeological site, the birthplace of the Olympic games, on the Peloponnese peninsula.

After destroying around 20 houses, “the fire’s front is now heading towards Lalas,” a wooded mountainous area to the north west of Olympia, local official Nektarios Farmakis told the ANA news agency. 

Olympia, usually thronging with tourists at this time of year, as well as six nearby villages, were evacuated the day before. 

A similar number of firefighters were also battling to contain a blaze on Evia, some 200 kilometres (120 miles) east of Athens. 

At least 150 houses were destroyed on the island as the fire surrounded a monastery and a dozen villages.

Two more villages were evacuated early on Thursday, ANA reported. 

The mayor of the town of Mantoudi, Giannis Tsapourniotis, said the fire was moving on four fronts, with one particularly difficult to control near the Saint David Monastery, which was evacuated on Wednesday. 

On Thursday, strong winds made it difficult for firefighting aircraft to reach the blazes, with poor visibility due to the thick smoke, ANA said. 

The fire brigade said Thursday that it had had to deal with 92 forest fires over the past 24 hours, on top of the 118 from the previous day. 

“We’re waging a battle of the titans,” deputy minister for civil protection Nikos Hardalias told journalists. “The hardest is still to come.”

Neighbouring Turkey is also suffering its worst fires in at least a decade, claiming the lives of eight people and forcing hundreds to evacuate in southern areas popular with tourists.

Experts have warned that global warming is increasing both the frequency and intensity of such fires. 

Long revered by the Maya people as sacred and today a magnet for tourists, local indigenous communities fear the water-filled sinkholes of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula are under threat from industrial pig farms.

Known as cenotes, the thousands of cavities are part of a vast labyrinth of caves connected to a giant aquifer under the lush jungle of a region known as the “Riviera Maya.”

For the indigenous people who inhabit the area in southeast Mexico, they are a source of drinking water that their ancestors called “sacred wells.”

“The area where we have our gift from God is like a sieve — the water from all around goes down into the cenotes,” said Doroteo Hau, an indigenous resident and tour guide.

Now the 62-year-old fears that the purity of the cenotes is being put at risk to satisfy burgeoning Asian demand for pork.

“They’re going to destroy what we’re taking care of,” said Hau, who teamed up with other residents to form an organization called the Guardians of the Cenotes.

In May they managed to get Mexico’s Supreme Court to ratify a suspension order for a farm with more than 45,000 pigs in Homun, home to 7,500 people. The case is under appeal.

If the complex reopens, Doroteo said that he is willing to “take up machetes” to defend the cenotes.

There are about 257 pig farms in the region, of which only 22 have submitted environmental impact studies, according to a report released by environmental group Greenpeace last year.

The environment ministry did not respond to AFP’s request for comment the matter.

– ‘You can’t breathe’ –

Often filled with stunning emerald or turquoise waters illuminated by a shaft of light from above, the sinkholes are a major attraction for snorkelers, scuba divers and other visitors.

“Tourists will stop coming if the bad smells get here,” said taxi driver Jesus Dzul, who earns a living from visitors who come to swim in the crystal clear waters.

Residents of several communities accuse farms located in remote areas of dumping untreated waste in the jungle.

“The stench is too much… you can’t breathe,” 71-year-old Teodorita Rejon said with a gesture of disgust before a protest march in one village against a nearby pig farm.

One demonstrator dragged a plastic pig through the dirt streets shouting demands for the farms to close.

Mexican pork exports increased by nearly 30 percent in value in 2020, to $916 million, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Sales to China, Mexico’s second biggest customer for the meat after Japan, have skyrocketed in recent years, from $2 million in 2017 to $264 million in 2020.

An outbreak of African swine fever in China in 2018 and 2019 saw millions of pigs slaughtered to prevent an epidemic, driving up pork prices and demand for imports.

– ‘We don’t pollute’ –

The stakes are so high that intimidation tactics are allegedly used against local communities.

“We’re threatened by the people who work on the farms,” resident Yolanda Chi said during a public consultation in which inhabitants mostly rejected the pig farms.

“They give them money to do it, but we’re going to vote anyway,” she said, as men nearby hurled insults at people participating in the referendum, which was not binding. 

The pig farm owners insist that their waste management meets the necessary standards.

“We don’t pollute anything,” Alberto Alfonso of Grupo Porcicola Mexicano, the largest operator in Yucatan, told AFP.

He showed off systems used to treat organic waste during a tour of the complex.

But the author of the Greenpeace study, Viridiana Lazaro, maintains that samples taken from the cenotes and wells in the area indicate the presence of “contaminants.”

Experts from the United Nations Development Program reported a similar finding. 

“It’s partly attributable to farms,” said Xavier Moya, representative of the UN agency in the Yucatan.

Samples contained bacteria found in animal feces and traces of antibiotics, he said.

For Hau and other indigenous residents, the idea of the sacred cenotes being gradually destroyed by pollution is too much to bear.

“No, we can’t take any more!” he said.

The flimsy planes tethered to metal drums to prevent them from accidentally becoming airborne are unlikely weapons in Kenya’s fight to protect threatened species as it conducts its first national wildlife census.

Decades of unbridled poaching, expanding human settlements and climate change have taken a heavy toll on the global wildlife population — and central Kenya is no exception.

African savanna elephants have been particularly hard-hit, with their numbers plunging by at least 60 percent during the last half-century, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

So the pilots preparing their aircraft at the tiny airport at Isiolo know they are on the frontlines of a battle with far-reaching consequences.

“Elephants are the key animals, but when you are able to locate (any) endangered species, you feel like the census is on the right track,” pilot Chris Cheruiyot tells AFP as he fastens the safety belt of his passenger, Julius Kabete.

A camera and audio recorder dangling from his neck, Kabete will spend the next few hours counting Somali giraffes, Grevy’s zebras, oryxes and other animals as the pair cruise the windy skies and refuel their two-seater Aviat Husky aircraft at specially set up stations in the forest.

The ambitious exercise, which kicked off in May, covers major species in more than 50 of Kenya’s national parks and reserves as well as private and community conservancies, and includes marine life.

Much of the existing data on the country’s wildlife population are gathered individually by local advocacy groups or international conservationists, contributing to a scattershot approach to animal protection.

Furthermore, training spotters is often both time-consuming and expensive.

The result is that many scientists prefer to use models to map wildlife instead of tracking animals in the flesh, says zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants.

“They publish modelled results (rather) than raw data,” he told AFP.

That makes this maiden census especially important. Its information will help the East African nation map a long-term strategy to save a cherished asset that is also a major tourist draw.

– ‘Very worrying’ –

But numbers tell only half the story. For the rest, the spotters need to track the animals’ habits — where they eat, drink and rest.

At a hotel in Isiolo, a team listens to audio files chronicling a day’s work.

The preliminary data are already “very worrying,” says Fred Omengo, a scientist with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), explaining that many of the animals were spotted around watering holes close to people’s homes, a sign of extensive human encroachment into wildlife territory.

“The little (food) that is available is basically a competition between domestic and wild animals,” he tells AFP.

“In most cases, domestic animals will have an upper hand.”

And, as humans attempt to fence out wildlife, both are paying a deadly price.

Nearly 500 people were mauled or crushed to death by wild animals between 2014 and 2017, the KWS said in a report published in December 2019. More recent figures were not available.

And the threat to humanity and to wildlife is only set to intensify, conservationists warn.

“All wildlife routes have been closed by humans and now elephants want water, know where it is but can’t get there. This is a worry,” Robert Obrein of KWS says.

“We have encroached into areas we have never been (in) before, and the numbers are growing. That means in another 10 years, we might not be having wildlife outside protected areas.”

– Wind and dust –

It is a fear not lost on the census takers, whose patient, painstaking efforts are often cut short by poor weather.

As sharp gusts sent clouds of dust flying into the atmosphere, diminishing visibility to less than half a kilometre (a quarter of a mile), the three pilots circled back for home after a four-hour mission, accepting defeat for now.

The aircraft are “inherently unstable” and too light to tackle high winds, explained Kennedy Shamala.

“You are flying below 500 feet (150 metres) above ground level, so you have minimum altitude to play with,” the soft-spoken pilot told AFP. 

“You are working throughout, both your legs and hands and observing.”

Long revered by the Maya people as sacred and today a magnet for tourists, local indigenous communities fear the water-filled sinkholes of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula are under threat from industrial pig farms.

Known as cenotes, the thousands of cavities are part of a vast labyrinth of caves connected to a giant aquifer under the lush jungle of a region known as the “Riviera Maya.”

For the indigenous people who inhabit the area in southeast Mexico, they are a source of drinking water that their ancestors called “sacred wells.”

“The area where we have our gift from God is like a sieve — the water from all around goes down into the cenotes,” said Doroteo Hau, an indigenous resident and tour guide.

Now the 62-year-old fears that the purity of the cenotes is being put at risk to satisfy burgeoning Asian demand for pork.

“They’re going to destroy what we’re taking care of,” said Hau, who teamed up with other residents to form an organization called the Guardians of the Cenotes.

In May they managed to get Mexico’s Supreme Court to ratify a suspension order for a farm with more than 45,000 pigs in Homun, home to 7,500 people. The case is under appeal.

If the complex reopens, Doroteo said that he is willing to “take up machetes” to defend the cenotes.

There are about 257 pig farms in the region, of which only 22 have submitted environmental impact studies, according to a report released by environmental group Greenpeace last year.

The environment ministry did not respond to AFP’s request for comment the matter.

– ‘You can’t breathe’ –

Often filled with stunning emerald or turquoise waters illuminated by a shaft of light from above, the sinkholes are a major attraction for snorkelers, scuba divers and other visitors.

“Tourists will stop coming if the bad smells get here,” said taxi driver Jesus Dzul, who earns a living from visitors who come to swim in the crystal clear waters.

Residents of several communities accuse farms located in remote areas of dumping untreated waste in the jungle.

“The stench is too much… you can’t breathe,” 71-year-old Teodorita Rejon said with a gesture of disgust before a protest march in one village against a nearby pig farm.

One demonstrator dragged a plastic pig through the dirt streets shouting demands for the farms to close.

Mexican pork exports increased by nearly 30 percent in value in 2020, to $916 million, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Sales to China, Mexico’s second biggest customer for the meat after Japan, have skyrocketed in recent years, from $2 million in 2017 to $264 million in 2020.

An outbreak of African swine fever in China in 2018 and 2019 saw millions of pigs slaughtered to prevent an epidemic, driving up pork prices and demand for imports.

– ‘We don’t pollute’ –

The stakes are so high that intimidation tactics are allegedly used against local communities.

“We’re threatened by the people who work on the farms,” resident Yolanda Chi said during a public consultation in which inhabitants mostly rejected the pig farms.

“They give them money to do it, but we’re going to vote anyway,” she said, as men nearby hurled insults at people participating in the referendum, which was not binding. 

The pig farm owners insist that their waste management meets the necessary standards.

“We don’t pollute anything,” Alberto Alfonso of Grupo Porcicola Mexicano, the largest operator in Yucatan, told AFP.

He showed off systems used to treat organic waste during a tour of the complex.

But the author of the Greenpeace study, Viridiana Lazaro, maintains that samples taken from the cenotes and wells in the area indicate the presence of “contaminants.”

Experts from the United Nations Development Program reported a similar finding. 

“It’s partly attributable to farms,” said Xavier Moya, representative of the UN agency in the Yucatan.

Samples contained bacteria found in animal feces and traces of antibiotics, he said.

For Hau and other indigenous residents, the idea of the sacred cenotes being gradually destroyed by pollution is too much to bear.

“No, we can’t take any more!” he said.

The flimsy planes tethered to metal drums to prevent them from accidentally becoming airborne are unlikely weapons in Kenya’s fight to protect threatened species as it conducts its first national wildlife census.

Decades of unbridled poaching, expanding human settlements and climate change have taken a heavy toll on the global wildlife population — and central Kenya is no exception.

African savanna elephants have been particularly hard-hit, with their numbers plunging by at least 60 percent during the last half-century, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

So the pilots preparing their aircraft at the tiny airport at Isiolo know they are on the frontlines of a battle with far-reaching consequences.

“Elephants are the key animals, but when you are able to locate (any) endangered species, you feel like the census is on the right track,” pilot Chris Cheruiyot tells AFP as he fastens the safety belt of his passenger, Julius Kabete.

A camera and audio recorder dangling from his neck, Kabete will spend the next few hours counting Somali giraffes, Grevy’s zebras, oryxes and other animals as the pair cruise the windy skies and refuel their two-seater Aviat Husky aircraft at specially set up stations in the forest.

The ambitious exercise, which kicked off in May, covers major species in more than 50 of Kenya’s national parks and reserves as well as private and community conservancies, and includes marine life.

Much of the existing data on the country’s wildlife population are gathered individually by local advocacy groups or international conservationists, contributing to a scattershot approach to animal protection.

Furthermore, training spotters is often both time-consuming and expensive.

The result is that many scientists prefer to use models to map wildlife instead of tracking animals in the flesh, says zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton of Save the Elephants.

“They publish modelled results (rather) than raw data,” he told AFP.

That makes this maiden census especially important. Its information will help the East African nation map a long-term strategy to save a cherished asset that is also a major tourist draw.

– ‘Very worrying’ –

But numbers tell only half the story. For the rest, the spotters need to track the animals’ habits — where they eat, drink and rest.

At a hotel in Isiolo, a team listens to audio files chronicling a day’s work.

The preliminary data are already “very worrying,” says Fred Omengo, a scientist with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), explaining that many of the animals were spotted around watering holes close to people’s homes, a sign of extensive human encroachment into wildlife territory.

“The little (food) that is available is basically a competition between domestic and wild animals,” he tells AFP.

“In most cases, domestic animals will have an upper hand.”

And, as humans attempt to fence out wildlife, both are paying a deadly price.

Nearly 500 people were mauled or crushed to death by wild animals between 2014 and 2017, the KWS said in a report published in December 2019. More recent figures were not available.

And the threat to humanity and to wildlife is only set to intensify, conservationists warn.

“All wildlife routes have been closed by humans and now elephants want water, know where it is but can’t get there. This is a worry,” Robert Obrein of KWS says.

“We have encroached into areas we have never been (in) before, and the numbers are growing. That means in another 10 years, we might not be having wildlife outside protected areas.”

– Wind and dust –

It is a fear not lost on the census takers, whose patient, painstaking efforts are often cut short by poor weather.

As sharp gusts sent clouds of dust flying into the atmosphere, diminishing visibility to less than half a kilometre (a quarter of a mile), the three pilots circled back for home after a four-hour mission, accepting defeat for now.

The aircraft are “inherently unstable” and too light to tackle high winds, explained Kennedy Shamala.

“You are flying below 500 feet (150 metres) above ground level, so you have minimum altitude to play with,” the soft-spoken pilot told AFP. 

“You are working throughout, both your legs and hands and observing.”

In the Ahr valley, mud-smeared bottles rescued from flooded cellars represent hope for a new beginning after the deadly catastrophe that hit Germany three weeks ago.

“I told myself we couldn’t just throw it all away,” recalls Linda Kleber, the founder of the “Flutwein” (“Flood wine”) initiative.

Kleber came up with the idea as she was retrieving bottle after bottle from the store of her flood-ravaged restaurant.

The vintages that could be saved are now being offered for delivery in the condition they were found: covered in silt, a singular reminder of the devastation the floods wreaked.

The money raised, more than two million euros to date, is “a source of hope for all the winegrowers and also for the hospitality sector,” says Peter Kriechel, 38, himself a wine producer and president of the local professional growers’ association.

In his cellar, about 200,000 bottles of wine were submerged on the night of June 14.

“I think we’re at the start of a long marathon,” he says. “An initiative like ‘Flutwein’ could give us a kickstart.”

– ‘A tsunami’ –

In the Ahr valley, known for the pinot noir that grows on its steep slopes, the economy relies significantly on viniculture and the tourism it generates.

“Without wine, the Ahr valley wouldn’t exist — to say nothing of its gastronomy,” says Joerg Kleber, husband of Linda.

All in all, last month’s disaster claimed the lives of 225 people across Europe, including 187 in Germany, and destroyed five to 10 percent of the wines in Ahr.

But the damage to machines and cellars has been much greater, with many holdings severely impacted or almost entirely destroyed.

Paul Schumacher, 63, is one of those whose losses were great.

“It wasn’t just a flood but a tsunami,” says the grower.

Just before the waters arrived at his door, Schumacher went down to make sure his barrels of wine were well sealed.

He and his wife then took shelter upstairs, but “the water very quickly rose a metre above the first floor,” he says, still visibly affected by what happened. In the end, the couple ended up spending part of the night on the roof.

A tenth of his five hectares of land was devastated. The ground floor of his house, where he also had a restaurant, is still completely coated in mud.

The veteran grower still hopes to harvest his grapes and produce this year’s vintage, however. The production of wine in the Ahrweiler region remains very uncertain, but neighbouring producers have offered to step in to help bring in this year’s crop.

– ‘Many will leave’ –

Facing one of the biggest natural disasters Germany has seen in the last few decades, Angela Merkel’s government has already signed off on emergency aid numbering in the hundreds of millions of euros to go to those most in need. 

The aid will be supplemented by a reconstruction project, costing further billions.

Locals nonetheless think the valley will never be the same again. “Many will leave and won’t rebuild their homes,” says  wine producer Schumacher.

It is an option the Kleber family have not thought about for an instant, even if their restaurant in the centre of Ahrweiler will not open again on the same spot.

The kitchen, the bar, the dining room and garden of ‘Kleber’s’ have more or less disappeared after a two-week clean up operation. What remains of it are the walls, painted in mud up to the high-water mark.

“Things were starting to get going again” after months of enforced stoppage due to the pandemic, laments Joerg Kleber, a chef by profession.

But the coronavirus was “nothing” compared to the forces which battered down on Ahrweiler in the space of a few hours on the night of the floods, he says.

There will be a new ‘Kleber’s’ nearby, the cook promises. 

“Our friends and our life is here,” he says. “After this catastrophe, our roots here might even be stronger than they were before.”

The father and son stood in the forest burning around them, the elder with a shovel in hand, the younger with a plastic bottle filled with gasoline.

As the son poured the fuel onto the forest floor, watching as the rising flames rendered white birch trunks black, his father shovelled dirt onto embers that popped across the other side of a trench marked for a controlled burn.

Ivan Fyodorov, 65, and his 42-year-old son Pyotr were helping firefighters on an afternoon in late July to prevent a wildfire from reaching their land in the Siberian region of Yakutia.

While large wildfires are an annual occurrence in Siberia, the blazes have hit Yakutia with an increasingly ferocious intensity the past three years, scorching its legendary vast northern forests known as the taiga.

With firefighters and emergency services struggling, hundreds of volunteers have joined the efforts to contain the blazes, which experts have linked to climate change.

Fyodorov said the first fire had come close to his farmland around the village of Byas-Kyuel in June, but they were able to beat it back. 

Then came the second. Then the third. 

“At that point we didn’t have the strength. It’s good these guys came,” he said of the dozen firefighters working nearby. 

Citing government inaction, Fyodorov said that he and his family have taken the fight into their own hands.

Pyotr had been helping him for 17 days straight, while his other three sons and daughter travelled four hours by car from the regional capital Yakutsk at the beginning of July to do their part.

“We haven’t been able to cut our hay yet because we’ve been busy fighting the fires,” Fyodorov said.

Asked what he would do if the fires keep intensifying in the coming years, he said: “I’ll fight the fires, what else can I do.”

“I’ve lived my whole life in the taiga. I’m dependent on nature,” he added. “We have to protect it.”

– ‘Nothing to breathe’ –

The fires have not only affected the taiga.

For days in July Yakutsk was covered in a smog that monitors called one of the world’s worst-ever air pollution events.

In the city of some 300,000 people on a late July weekend evening, volunteers were preparing to leave in a convoy for the Gorniy district, which is home to Byas-Kyuel and where some of the most intense fires had raged that month. 

Some three dozen members of a local athletics club gathered around a dummy on the floor in a volunteer centre where two emergencies ministry officials conducted a rapid rescue training session. 

“Our job is to get you ready as quickly as possible,” one yelled out to the group.

The men, eager to get moving, half-listened as they shuffled back and forth.

“When our homeland is burning, we can’t stand on the sidelines,” said the club’s 50-year-old head, Turgun Popov. 

He told AFP that their goal was not to put out the fire on their own, but to give professionals “the chance to rest for a couple of hours or a couple of days because they have been putting out the fires for months.”

Earlier that day the centre had sent 10 volunteers by helicopter to the Lena Pillars national park — a natural rock formation on the UNESCO heritage list — and was planning to send more that week. 

As the emergencies ministry officials trained the sporting club members, 25-year-old volunteer Lili Odun received two phone calls from others interested in deploying.

Popov motioned to the hazy sky outside to explain why people were volunteering. 

“There’s nothing to breathe,” he said. 

As thick clouds of smoke billow across the vast Siberian region of Yakutia, Yegor Zakharov and his team are racing to stop its smouldering forests from burning even more.

Members of Russia’s Aerial Forest Protection Service, his team spent a recent July evening patrolling a five-kilometre (three-mile) trench they had dug at the edge of the village of Byas-Kyuel to keep an approaching wildfire at bay.

Wearing respirators against the acrid smoke, the men lit strips of rubber tyre they hung from sticks, then tapped them onto the dry forest floor on the other side of the trench to start a controlled burn.

The team has lost track of how many blazes they have tackled since late May — mostly successfully, sometimes not — as Yakutia suffers through yet another ever-worsening wildfire season.

“We held one property for eight days but it burned in the end because the tractors never got to us,” Zakharov said, explaining that in such cases they use shovels to dig trenches instead.

But even more than equipment, the 35-year-old brigade leader has another urgent plea: “We need more people.”

Fuelled by summer heatwaves, wildfires have swept through more than 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of Yakutia’s swampy coniferous taiga, with more than a month still to go in Siberia’s annual fire season.

Vast areas of Russia have been suffering from heatwaves and droughts driven by climate change in recent years, with numerous temperature records set.

It is the third straight year that Yakutia — Russia’s coldest region and bordering the Arctic Ocean — has seen wildfires so vicious that they have nearly overwhelmed the forest protection service. 

– Limited manpower –

The group of about 250 full-time staffers and 150 summer contract workers, who track the fires by air and drop in by parachute or on off-road trucks, is responsible for a region roughly five times the size of France.

Their goal, said Yakutia’s chief pilot observer Svyatoslav Kolesov, is to put out the fires entirely. But they also have to contend with blazes that overwhelm their manpower.

The number of firefighters in the region is far from adequate, Kolesov told AFP, recalling that when he started in 1988 the group had around 1,600 people before facing cuts over the years.

Kolesov, who monitors fires from daily flights and issues instructions to teams on the ground, said that because of limited resources the group will often keep an eye on a new blaze until it becomes sizeable. Only then will it send in a team.

“And if the fires spread quickly and soon cover a large area, then we try to save inhabited areas and strategic objects,” he said.

Environmentalists have long argued that Russia underfunds its forest fire fighting capabilities.

The country’s environment ministry is itself open about the policy, in 2015 issuing a decree that allows regions to ignore blazes if the cost of fighting fires outweighs the expected damages. 

“We’ve said for years that Russia needs to increase its budget to fight wildfires by at least three times,” Grigory Kuksin, the head of Greenpeace’s wildfire unit in the country, told AFP.

– ‘Everything would burn’ –

In early July, Russia mobilised its defence and emergencies ministries to help Yakutia battle the wildfires, while dozens of volunteers also took up the fight.

But the lack of funds for the Aerial Forest Protection Service — the only group wholly dedicated to fighting wildfires, according to Kolesov — is evident on the ground.

Brigade leader Zakharov said he asked officials repeatedly for a quad bike that never arrived so his men didn’t have to patrol their trench on foot.

“I lent most of my equipment to a team at a nearby fire,” he explained.

Later he received the all-terrain vehicle, but not before officials during a recent planning meeting disparaged the progress his team of five full-time staffers and eight summer contractors had made.

“What right do they have to criticise us?” Zakharov said, adding he had stormed out before the meeting had ended.

“Our guys have been working in the forest for a month straight. Anyone would start getting tired.” 

The brigade leader and his men were planning to fight on nonetheless. After Byas-Kyuel, they planned to move straight on to the next fire without taking a break. 

“If we weren’t around,” Zakharov said, “everything would burn.”