Emergencies of 2014

By Vestnik Kavkaza

This year the spread of the Ebola virus was recognized as an emergency situation of international importance. As for Russia, experts predicted many natural disasters for 2014 caused by hydrological and meteorological phenomena leading to problems with electricity power supply, communications, transport and utility services. The forecast was based on the fact that industrially-developed countries are under threat of natural and man-made emergency situations. Accidents, disasters and natural hazards which became typical for Russia and foreign countries in the last 10 years claimed the lives of a hundred thousand people and damaged the environment severely. A hundred million dollars were spent on restoring residential and agricultural areas after the emergency situations. The most frequent of them are fires, accidents at life-support systems and pipelines, transport accidents, and building collapses.

In 2014 specialists of EMERCOM eliminated emergency situations which were connected with natural disasters, they fought fires in difficult conditions, reacted to every second car accident, defused mines from the times of the Great Patriotic War. According to Vladimir Puchkov, the Minister of Civil Defense, Emergencies and Disaster Relief of the Russian Federation, who replaced Sergei Shoygu in the position 18 months ago, this year the volume of losses from disasters has fallen, as has the number of emergency situations: “General losses from disasters fell by more than 20 percent in Russia… The general number of fires decreased by 2.3 percent… In recent years the number of survivors in fires has doubled… As for risks connected with car accidents, more than 130 thousand times our groups visited scenes of car accidents, together with emergency medical services, the traffic police, supporting and helping drivers. And it brought positive results as well.”

25 countries received Russian EMERCOM aid in 2014 – almost all places of the planet – Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, countries of North Africa. “The support of the Russian state often was the only prospect for people to survive and receive necessary help,” Puchkov said. According to him, EMERCOM also “evacuated citizens from various places of the planet – India, Bulgaria, Turkey, citizens of which appeared in difficult situations.”

EMERCOM signed more than 60 bilateral agreements, including with such organizations as the SCO, APEC, ASEAN, the EU, and the International Civic Defense Organization. Last week Puchkov met the Interior Minister of Iran. “We discussed issues of our bilateral cooperation in various spheres between administrations, systems of monitoring and forecasting emergency situations, systems of organization and training staff, systems which analyze the seismic resistance of buildings and constructions. It is a big work which we are going to continue. Moreover, according to President Putin’s decision which was announced at the pentalateral meeting in Astrakhan, we are preparing major international training of life-savers. It will be held in 2016. Specialists from all Caspian Region countries will participate in the training.”

Cooperation in the Caspian Region in the sphere is quite active. For example, joint exercises on disaster relief are provided. This summer at the seventh International Conference for Disaster Risk Control of the Organization of Economic Cooperation in Qabala representatives of Emergency Ministries of Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Turkmenistan agreed to deepen cooperation in the sphere of civic defense, defense of the population and territories from natural and man-made emergency situations.