Is lightning striking twice in the same place?
Kommersant has sounded the tocsin,
warning that once again peat bogs around Moscow are burning:
"According to the Ministry of Emergency Situations, on Sunday in the region around Moscow sixteen wildfires broke out simultaneously."Authorities said that the fires have been extinguished, but
Kommersant quoted Grigory Kuksin, of Greenpeace Russia, who refuted the good news. "In the Gus-Khrustalny district alone, five fires are burning," Kuksin said.
"The situation in the region is bad. There aren't enough resources to put out fires or even contain them."The bogs currently ablaze may prefigure a return of the catastrophic wildfires that last summer coincided with a record-shattering heat wave and raged for weeks, generating lethal smog that blanketed the capital, wrought billions of dollars worth of damage and, at least indirectly, caused tens of thousands of deaths.
Disaster may well hit again.
Zhivoy Zhurnal published a photo of a grim poster of unknown provenance that has mysteriously been turning up in the capital's elevators. The poster states: "In accordance with predictions of an emergency in 2011, the threat of wildfires in the Moscow region continues."
