Report Slams City Fire Actions

By Claire Bigg

Staff Writer

Published: September 20, 2002 (Issue # 805)

The St. Petersburg Prosecutor's Office has accused the St. Petersburg administration of fiddling while parts of the city were burning.

An investigation into this summer's blazes carried out by the office concluded that the St. Petersburg administration violated federal fire-safety laws. The violations hindered the fight against the blazes, and allowed new fires to flare up, a report by the office said.

"Because of the absence of preventive measures against peat fires on the territory of St. Petersburg, and unsatisfactory organization of fire safety measures by officials of the St. Petersburg administration ... there were a whole series of peat and grass fires at the beginning of September,'' stated the report, a copy of which was obtained by the St. Petersburg Times.

The prosecutor's office sent the results of the investigation to St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev a week ago.

The report said the federal law on fire safety states that preventing and tackling fires is one of the government's most important functions.

The investigation revealed that only one tanker was dispatched to the Vyborg District's Sosnovka Park, where peat fires had spread to cover 300 square meters.

The territorial administration of St. Petersburg's Nevsky District put out peat and grass fires in the same way, by hosing them down, the report says.

Peat fires burn 5 meters to 7 meters under ground level and need to be dug up by bulldozers before being put out. Most of the fires that affected St. Petersburg this month and last were peat fires. They are particularly dangerous as they are not always visible and can trap passers-by.

Up to 3,000 hectares in the city and the oblast that surrounds it were on fire simultaneously during the last two months, filling the air with thick smog that forced Pulkovo airport to cancel incoming flights for one day. No buildings or human lives were harmed.

All forest fires have since been extinguished, with only a handful of peat fires in the oblast still burning Thursday, after several days of rain this week.

The prosecutor's office slammed City Hall's reluctance to cooperate with the Leningrad Oblast, saying the city administration had made a late response to requests for it to lend the oblast fire-fighting vehicles.

Requests to City Hall from Vladimir Kirillov, the oblast's first vice governor, for vehicles to help fight blazes in the oblast's Lomonosovsky, Kirovsky and Gatchinsky districts were mostly ignored.

The Commission for Emergency Situations, which is headed by St. Petersburg Vice Governor Anna Markova, answered on Sept. 5, five days after the request was made, by granting three of the 13 vehicles for which the oblast asked. The vehicles were allocated only to the Lomonosov district.

"The city turned down the oblast's proposition to fight the fires together,'' said Valentin Sidorin, head of the Leningrad Oblast government's press service. "It is important to cooperate, because fires can easily spread between the oblast and the city areas. The St. Petersburg administration began dealing with the fires only after the federal authorities' local administration told them to do so. It has to understand that extinguishing fires is not our task alone.''

It is not the first time that the city administration and the Leningrad Oblast have clashed over questions of fire safety. When a thick smog descended on St. Petersburg between Sept. 3 and Sept. 6, city and oblast officials were arguing over which fires caused the smoke.

Despite City Hall finally helping the oblast toward the beginning of September, relations still appear strained.

"Most of the fires that were burning this summer were located in the oblast's territory, not in St. Petersburg," said Alexander Afanasyev, the governor's spokesperson.

"That is why blaming the city administration for coordinating poorly with the oblast just doesn't make sense. The fires were their problem, not ours,'' he said Thursday in a telephone interview.

Afanasyev said he did not know if Yakovlev had read the prosecutor's office's report.

"I don't know if the governor has received it,'' he said.

"The results of this investigation seem somewhat exaggerated to me. And wanting to determine the guilty party is not constructive, in the case of a natural catastrophe.''

Nonetheless, the prosecutor's office has resolved that City Hall must explain why it breached fire-safety laws and wants those guilty of negligence to be accountable.

"The administration has one month to consider our report, and to take action on the listed shortcomings,'' prosecutor's office spokesperson Yelena Ordinskaya said Thursday.

"Our statements are founded and well researched. The administration will not get away with it; we know the law, and the administration has violated it.''