The country's chief lung doctor, Alexander Chuchalin, has said the air pollution is equal to about two packs of cigarettes smoked within three or four hours. The pollution-monitoring agency said that pollution has reached a level 10 times higher than acceptable, and has urged Moscow residents to wear thick, eight-layer face masks outdoors.
But what about the air indoors? Very few Moscovites have air conditioning. The air inside apartments is the same as air outside. Moscovites have nowhere to go to get away from the smog. That part of the story hasn’t generally been reported.
I won’t get into the various examples of incompetence and lack of planning for dealing with today’s problems. Let me just say that summertime fires in the highly combustible peat bogs are a regular occurrence, albeit not usually so dramatic as this year.
It is said that a question Russians frequently ask is “Who’s to blame?” The fall guy is not usually a high level person, although this time Putin himself has been criticized. Frequent Kremlin critic Yulia Latynina says, “In reality, there is really only one bureaucrat who is responsible for this tragedy — Putin himself.”
When Putin signed the Forest Code of 2007, written to please paper mill owners and real estate developers, forests were to be “protected” by those using them, entities with rights to cut them down. The number of forest monitors was cut by 75 percent.
Latynina says, "Although Russia has been burning for a month, the army was ordered to join the firefighting battle only several days ago. Why was the army not called up three weeks ago? Because there is no fundamental system of controlling and managing the country. Putin decides everything in Russia, and he was too busy with other things during the first three weeks of the fires — for example, doing photo ops with bikers in Crimea or singing songs with the 10 spies who recently returned from captivity in U.S. detention centers."
"One shouldn't think that the drought will pass if we just pray to God and then forget and fall into sin," Kirill said during a visit to the town of Lukoyanov. He cited an Old Testament story about a drought sent on the Jews for worshipping a pagan god and said Russians should turn into "a different people" by abandoning their sins.
You’ll note that the patriarch has opinions not unlike those of some American religious leaders who have commented on the cause of hurricanes.
I’m going to finger someone who has escaped harsh questioning until now, and that is the king of Moscow – excuse me, the mayor of Moscow for the last 18 years, Yury Luzhkov.
The mayor isn’t around right now. He’s on vacation. Where? His aides won’t say. When will he be back? His aides won’t say. The fires are not his problem, they’re outside the city. Oh.
In my opinion, the city of Moscow could and should have lots of air conditioned shelters set up for the most vulnerable, if only for a few hours of respite during the day. At minimum, more hospitals could and should be air conditioned.
How many deaths will occur because of the current harsh conditions? The answer to that is political, because of course the question really is, how many deaths will be reported as having been caused by these harsh conditions. Count on lowball figures.
The Moscow Times reported on August 5, “The scorching heat and thick smog in Moscow have not reached levels that could be considered critical, the Russian capital's chief pulmonary specialist said on Thursday.” The report noted however that on Wednesday the overnight invasion of acrid smog had shrouded the city's streets and landmarks in a choking haze that was so dense that airplane pilots diverted to other airports.
Pulmonary specialist Andrei Belevsky said, "The peat bogs [around Moscow] are on fire not for the first time. This concentration [of toxic substances] doesn't harm the health of Muscovites." Ah, what has he been smoking?
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