The authorities of Yakutia called the message about deforestation to protect against fire as a mistake of the press service

The data that the head of Yakutia Arsen Nikolaev ordered to cut down trees in the vicinity of settlements threatened by forest fires is incorrect. About it stated In an interview with RBC, the head of the department of information policy and mass communications of the regional government Vasily Ambrosiev.

Information about the disposal of Nikolaev appeared August 8 on the website of the government of the republic. In the material dedicated to extinguishing fires, it was said that the head of Yakutia instructed the first deputy chairman Dmitry Sadovnikov “to instruct the heads of municipalities that are threatened by fires, within the framework of the emergency regime in the region, to cut down all nearby forests around settlements.” Then this sentence was removed from the news, but its previous version available in a cached copy of Google.

“Indeed, there was a mistake in the original text in the transmission of information from the press service. We fixed it promptly, ”Ambrosiev said. According to him, it was about clearing the existing mineralized strips from dead wood and fallen trees, which were laid around the villages to protect them from fire. Ambrosiev added that the clearing of the mineralized strips is already underway.

This is not the first time that the Yakutian authorities have denied reports of deforestation amid fires. On July 23, the satirical edition “Panorama” wrote that Nikolaev gave an order “to cut down the entire surviving forest in the region by the end of the year” in order to “save residents from the annually tiresome and economically ineffective activity.” The operational headquarters of Yakutia, in response to this, urged to trust only verified information from official sources.

As Vladimir Leonov, the head of the Yakutsk aviation forest guard base, said at the meeting, as a result of a strong wind on August 7, some forest fires in the republic covered a distance of 40 to 130 km. Now 155 forest fires are active on the territory of Yakutia. 3.5 thousand people and 511 pieces of equipment are involved in extinguishing the fire. Fires, the area of ​​which has exceeded 600 hectares, are also extinguished by aircraft of the Ministry of Defense.

Because of the smoke, the Yakutsk airport and the ferry on the Lena River stopped working. The smoke also reached neighboring regions, including the Krasnoyarsk Territory. The damage from fires in Yakutia is estimated at 1 billion rubles.