As of today, there are only smouldering fires with no open flame, which will be extinguished soon, First Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar said referring to the wildfires in the Semei Ormany Nature Reserve in the Abai region. According to him, once the fire is extinguished, sanitary deforestation and new tree planting will be carried out. The circumstances of the disaster were complicated by unfavorable weather conditions, as the air temperature rose to +38 degrees Celsius, and the gusty wind reached 25 meters per second. However, all these factors do not remove responsibility from the government and persons in charge, Sklyar added. It is obvious that the initial situation and the fire’s possible scale were underestimated.
“Situations like this require more rapid action. We missed the initial moment when the fire could have been contained. As you remember, a small-scale fire occurred in the same forestry on May 22 when over 5,000 hectares of forest were burning. It was quickly extinguished but we underestimated the incident. Now the prosecutor’s office is conducting an investigation and will soon provide full information on the case,” Sklyar noted.
At the government’s meeting, Kazakh Prime Minister Alikhan Smailov instructed the Emergency Situations Ministry to revise wildfire response algorithms. It is essential to send a sufficient number of equipment and specialists to the site in the first hours of the disaster. The relevant ministry, along with the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, should take measures to equip national parks and forestries with early fire detection and monitoring systems.
