Wildfires sweep through 50,000 hectares in Russian regions

Firefighters are working on extinguishing over 100 wildfires on the territory of around 50,000 hectares, the press service of the Aerial Forest Protection Service said on Tuesday. On Monday, forest fires covered around 40,000 hectares, Trend reports citing TASS.

"As of 12am on 2 July 2019, 116 forest fires are reported on the territory of 49,941 hectares, with active firefighting efforts underway," the press service said.

The largest forest fires are reported in the Krasnoyarsk (29,958 hectares), Irkutsk (12,814 hectares) and Zabaikalsky (3,808 hectares) regions. Wildfires are also registered in nine other regions.

A total of 2,500 people and nearly 465 units of equipment are involved in extiguishing forest fires.

In the last 24 hours, firefighters extinguished 57 forest fires on the territory of 11,500 hectares.

The state of emergency over wildfires was declared in several parts of the Ryazan, Zabaikalsky, Krasnoyarsk and Yakutia regions.