Mikhailov: Protective hoops are made through the forests, for their fire protection

Employees of the PE « National Forests » clean the forests and then make machinery. These are some of the measures taken to prevent the forest fires from last year, when thousands of trees burned and died game and birds. Deputy Director of PE « National Forests » Kire Mikhailov says making protective hoops through the forests, last year proved to be a good practice when several villages located at the foot of Mount Serta.

– At the moment we are actively working to purify the roads we have, on the forest road infrastructure, opening new roads and arranging the already existing ones. It means making protective hoops for protection against possible fires – says Mihailov.

He adds that government working groups are focusing on developing a national fire protection strategy. The analysis previously indicated that no institution in the country was appropriately ready to fight the flames.

– The strategy involves purchasing what is nowhere. So no institution is ready to protect against fires, including starting with us and all the others. Everywhere they are with dilapidated vehicles, everywhere with equipment that is malfunctioning and what I said at first, we have been waiting for our employees to extinguish fires literally on slippers, in the true sense of the word. We waited for them with unmistakable health people – explains Mikhailov.

Last year, over 94,000 hectares were burned in the country, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System, Copernicus program.