Forest fire school for volunteers of Luhansk region

Catastrophic forest and landscape fires of a new type that occurred in Ukraine in April, July, and September-October, 2020 in Zhytomyr, Kyiv and Luhansk regions resulted in human casualties, destruction of settlements, damage and loss of forests on an area of more than 157 thousand hectares. The costs of extinguishing fires reached hundreds of millions of hryvnias, and the damage to society, the economy and the environment reached tens of billions of hryvnias.

One of the main causes of such fires was a combination of a multi-month period of extreme fire danger (class 5) with wind speeds above 35-45 km / h. Given the constant presence of a significant number of fire sources, such weather conditions led to the simultaneous occurrence of a significant number of rapid landscape fires, which acquired a high fire intensity after moving to pine forests, which created extreme difficulties for their extinguishing.

Climate change, which has become one of the causes of new types of fires, indicates a high probability of recurrence of weather conditions with extreme danger, similar to those in 2020. New levels of weather fire danger and new types of fires require new methods of extinguishing. In the absence of state funding for forestry, the real opportunities for updating firefighting equipment of forestry enterprises are significantly limited. Thus, currently the main ways to fight new types of fires are those that will not require significant financial costs: 1) improving the fire prevention system; 2) improving interdepartmental coordination of services responsible for fire prevention and extinguishing, public safety; 3) increasing the level of readiness, efficiency of fire detection and the first attack of the fire; 4) wide involvement of volunteers in fire prevention and supporting them during firefighting; 5) advanced trainings for managers of forest fire extinguishing, forest protection and forest firefighters, volunteers on the application of modern methods of fire prevention and extinguishing; 6) improving the organization of firefighting.

During June 26-27, 2021, employees of the Department of Forestry, Forest Pyrology Laboratory of NUBiP of Ukraine and the Regional Eastern Europe Fire Monitoring Center, together with the charitable organization "Vostok-SOS Charitable Foundation" conducted a training for volunteers of Luhansk region on the basis of SE "Severodonetsk LGM" and Vostok-SOS Charitable Foundation. The trainings took the form of reports, practical classes, excursions and field exercises.

The training was attended by 25 volunteers from Luhansk region - a representative of the TV channel "Donbass Online", representatives of the Rubizhne territorial community, foresters of SE "Severodonetsk LMG", SE "Novoaydarske LMG", SE "Stanychno-Luganske DLMG", SE "Kreminsky", representatives of "Vostok-SOS".

As a result, the participants of the training compiled a list of promising ares in which volunteers can work to improve the protection of natural areas from fires.