Public holiday declared in areas of Siberia due to fires

Authorities in Yakutia, Siberia, have declared a public holiday in several districts due to smoke from the fires that have ravaged millions of hectares in that region since the start of summer.

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Friday, August 13 will be non-working in eleven districts and cities of Yakutia, according to a decree published Thursday, August 12 on the website of the government of this immense and very sparsely populated region of northern Siberia. This measure aims to "

" appeared in the air due to forest fires, according to the same source. Among the areas concerned, there is in particular the city of Yakutsk, capital of Yakutia, whose airport had to suspend flights due to poor visibility.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered to redouble efforts to control the fires in Yakutia, where the situation continues to worsen, the fire having burned more than eight million hectares of forests there. Currently, several thousand firefighters are deployed to control the fire. The US space agency, NASA, reported Saturday August 7 that the smoke had "

". During a visit to Yakutia in late July, firefighters and local authorities told AFP they lacked men, equipment and other resources to deal with the scale of the fires.

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Environmentalists question Russian forest firefighting policy, including a 2015 government decree allowing local authorities to ignore fires if the cost to put them out exceeds the estimated damage.

If it is difficult to link a fire in particular to climate change, the latter makes these disasters more likely and virulent and Russian scientists note that the current fires are indeed a consequence of the global rise in temperatures.