Firefighters have put up 13 wildfires in Russia’s Far East over the past 24 hours, local forestry authorities said on Monday.
Another nine wildfires have been localized, while 19 others are still raging in the region.
A total of 41 fires covering the area of over 650 hectares have been registered in the Far East over the past 24 hours.
More than 200,000 hectares of forest have already burned down in Russia’s Siberia and the Far East since the start of the summer, according to Russian emergency authorities.
On Saturday, an airport in the Siberian city of Yakutsk was closed for several hours due to thick smoke from wildfires.
Russia has 220,000 professional firefighters. Russian authorities have also encouraged the creation of volunteer firefighting units around the country to monitor forest fires.
In the summer of 2010, devastating wildfires swept across Russia, killing more than 50 people, destroying thousands of houses, 2.6 million hectares of woods and a quarter of the country’s grain harvest.
