Forest fire think over

Forest fires in Russia are getting worse and this can be the worst disaster that russian ever have. I sometime hear about this incidents from a mass media but it is not able to catch any attention, until I read "Moscow under smog health warning as wildfires burn"[1] on the BBC News this evening.

I was imagined that it just an ordinary fire in the forest therefore the question popped in my mind was, do I really have to concern about this? Maybe I should concern with a dam in China going to break because of a heavy flood instead of a fire in Russia. As you knows, if Chinese's dam was broken, a vast amount of water will run through Mae-Kong river and this will cause serious problem in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Sorry, that gonna be a off topic.

I read the news then I tried to indicate how severe the fires have. What a surprise, an area burned by the fires are very huge. Please look at the image, the fires marked in orange are spreading cover in many places in Russia, especially in the center of the country near Moscow and Ryazan. This make fire fighters somewhat tough missions to control all of it. Report says 2,000 homes have been burned to ashes. And the heavy smoke caused by the fires along with high concentrate of CO2 that scattering into atmosphere stimulate the green house effect and make bad visibility to entire area of every towns nearby. Therefore, this is the factor I mostly concern about in this disaster because you can get a lung cancer caused by inhaling fires' smoke, "according to some experts, inhaling the polluted air is as dangerous as smoking several packets of cigarettes a day." ("Mortality rate rises", subsection in [1], 2010, ¶ 11) And the worse news is the smoke, as much as this one, can travel long distant across many countries. Even it rarely to happen, if the wind blow south from Russia, it is possible that people of Thailand can be its victim; think about a forest fire that occured in Indonesia could travelled across the sea and reached Malaysia and some southern provinces of Thailand.

Well, this crisis is not as little as I have though, and its effects affect all mankind. According to many disasters we are now facing today, lead to another question, "what is happening to our earth?"

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References

[1] Moscow under smog health warning as wildfires burn. (2010, August 6). BBC News. Retrieved August 7, 2010 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10897116. Last updated at 19:10 GMT.

[2] In pictures: Smog grips Moscow. (2010, August 6). BBC News. Retrieved August 7, 2010 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10891244 Last updated at 10:59 GMT.