Sharjah24 – AFP: As thick clouds of smoke billow across the vast Siberian region of Yakutia, Yegor Zakharov and his team are racing to stop its smouldering forests from burning even more.
Members of Russia's Aerial Forest Protection Service, his team spent a recent July evening patrolling a five-kilometre (three-mile) trench they had dug at the edge of the village of Byas-Kyuel to keep an approaching wildfire at bay.
Wearing respirators against the acrid smoke, the men lit strips of rubber tyre they hung from sticks, then tapped them onto the dry forest floor on the other side of the trench to start a controlled burn.
The team has lost track of how many blazes they have tackled since late May -- mostly successfully, sometimes not -- as Yakutia suffers through yet another ever-worsening wildfire seasons.
"We held one property for eight days but it burned in the end because the tractors never got to us," Zakharov said, explaining that in such cases they use shovels to dig trenches instead.
But even more than equipment, the 35-year-old brigade leader has another urgent plea: "We need more people."
Fuelled by summer heatwaves, wildfires have swept through more than 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of Yakutia's swampy coniferous taiga, with more than a month still to go in Siberia's annual fire season.
Vast areas of Russia have been suffering from heatwaves and droughts driven by climate change in recent years, with numerous temperature records set.
It is the third straight year that Yakutia -- Russia's coldest region and bordering the Arctic Ocean -- has seen wildfires so vicious that they have nearly overwhelmed the forest protection service.
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