Hot Weather Has Killed Thousands Of People In Moscow

Several thousand citizens of Moscow's alleged to have been killed in July alone this year due to heat, which had never happened before, and the death toll may increase in August, a Russian scientist said Tuesday.

Moscow, a metropolis with more than 10 million residents, has been buffeted by the heat since last June. Daily temperatures sometimes reach 40 degrees Celsius.

The crisis makes wilted as the wheat crop in Russia, cut its economic growth this year in the amount of billions of dollars and killing at least 54 people due to forest fires. Hot air somewhat subsided on Tuesday.

Citing a report by the Moscow Registration Office, then a senior researcher of ecology and demography at the Academy of Sciences of Russia, Boris Revich says 5840 more people have been killed in Moscow in July, more than in July last year.

Revich says he believes the vast majority of additional casualties have been caused by the tremendous heat.

"It was so easy to predict," said Revich at a briefing. "The only thing that made me ... I blame myself is that my estimate (of casualties) is too slow at the beginning of a heat wave."

"But we never have experience in estimating this terrible heat, mainly because we had never experienced heat like this before."

State Statistics Committee (Goskomstat) is scheduled to broadcast the data on casualties around August 20, said Revich. Figures of casualties for August will be aired in September.

Health department chief in Moscow, Andrei Seltsovsky end the official silence about the impact of such heat and smoke caused by forest fires that have blanketed Moscow since the end of July.

Andrei said on August 9 that the death toll nearly doubled to be 700 people every day, and heat into the main killer.

source : Antara