Less than a week after Russia's top emergencies official declared victory over the wildfires that raged through the summer, fires in the Volgograd Region killed two people and destroyed more than 450 buildings.
"One man was killed in the Danilovskoye district, in the Kotovsky district a woman died and 13 people were hospitalized. Most are in stable condition, but one of the woman has second-degree burns. Another person was injured in the Kamyshinsky district," a regional official told RIA Novosti on Thursday.
Sources in the region's administration said 19 people were hospitalized and almost 750 evacuated from the disaster zone.
The combination of the high winds and unseasonably high temperatures meant more than 30 fires were recorded in nine different districts of the Volgograd Region. A total of 21 settlements in four districts were affected by wildfires, but 18 have either been localized or put out.
Almost 400 houses were destroyed and at least 20 settlements with a population of about 50,000 people are under threat.
Some of the fires were started by sparks when gusting winds brought down power lines, while the Emergency Situations Ministry said careless use of fires and smoldering garbage dumps had exacerbated the dangers created by temperatures of up to 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).
Two Il-76 firefighting planes and a Be-200 amphibious aircraft from Moscow and two Mi-8 helicopters from the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don arrived to the affected area early on Friday. A total of 1,500 people are involved in firefighting efforts.
Eyewitnesses said the village of Alexandrovka in Volgograd Region's Zhirnovsky district was almost totally destroyed.
"Almost the whole village was burned. It was hell. It has still not all been extinguished," one witness said.
Fire has spread to the neighboring Saratov Region, where a total of seven wildfires were detected in six districts. A total of14 houses and more than a dozen of other buildings were destroyed, but no casualties have been reported.
"Wildfire situation is under control. We prevent the fires from spreading to other settlements, over 2,000 houses have been saved," a local emergencies ministry spokesman said.
President Dmitry Medvedev ordered that measures be stepped up in order to contain the new outbreak of fires and help the victims, the Kremlin press service said.
Medvedev also ordered Russian Regional Development Minister Viktor Basargin to "organize soonest rebuilding of houses and payment of compensations to those affected," his spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said.
Experts fear that the strong winds and high temperatures could cause the new fires spread to other regions, including Astrakhan Region and the republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Kalmykia, an emergencies spokesperson said.
The fires that ravaged the European part of Russia a month ago burned down 2,000 houses, leaving 3,500 people homeless. More than 50 people died, most in the early days of the crisis.
The government's response to the summer's wildfires was widely criticized and the damage wreaked by the new blazes, coming just days after Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu declared the fires defeated, could provoke further criticism.
"We defeated the peat fires, we defeated the forest fires, we saved 4,500 thousand settlements," Shoigu said in a television interview broadcast on Sunday.
VOLGOGRAD, September 3 (RIA Novosti)
