A blanket of wildfire smoke has engulfed towns across Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk region following a region-wide emergency declaration, with officials warning Monday that the territory now accounts for nearly half of all wildfires in Russia.
“Heavy smoke has spread across all settlements in the district due to a large number of active fires,” Yevgeny Petrenko, head of the northern Yeniseysky district in the Krasnoyarsk region, said Sunday.
While officials have said they do not expect flames to reach populated areas, local media published images of a thick layer of smoke suffocating the towns of Lesosibirsk and Yeniseysk, which have a combined population of around 80,000 people.
In one widely shared video, a man was seen walking his dog while wearing a gas mask.
“It’s getting harder and harder to breathe inside our own apartments,” a local Telegram channel reporting on the emergency in Lesosibirsk wrote. IQAir, an air quality tracking company, shows that the air quality level in the area is “unhealthy.”
