Russia’s chief doctor Gennady Onishchenko said 78 children’s holiday camps had been closed due to the heatwave and smoke and 10,000 children taken home to their parents.
The mortality rate in Moscow soared by 50 per cent in July compared to the same period last year, according to Yevgenia Smirnova, an official from the Moscow registry office.
Travel agents reported that all the package holidays abroad for the coming weekend had been snapped up by Muscovites desperate to escape their smog-filled city, the Interfax news agency reported.
The Russian Football Union (RFU) said it had decided to move Wednesday’s friendly against Bulgaria to Saint Petersburg as current conditions were dangerous for the players’ health.
The country is also facing a severe drought that has destroyed 10 million hectares of its arable land and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday banned exports from the world’s third wheat exporter until year end.
BP may in the future drill a new well to extract crude left behind in the reservoir of a damaged Gulf of Mexico oil field, a senior executive with the firm said yesterday.
“Clearly there’s lots of oil and gas here and we’ll have to think about what to do with that at some point,” chief operating officer Doug Suttles told reporters.
Asked whether BP would consider donating the proceeds from the sale of any oil from the well to those affected by the worst maritime oil spill on record or selling the rights to another oil company, Mr Suttles said “we just haven’t thought about that”.
“What we’ve been focused on is the response right now. We haven’t even thought about what we’d do with this reservoir and this field someday.”
Some 15 weeks after the deadly April 20 explosion on the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, the runaway well which spewed 4.1 million barrels of oil into sea is finally plugged.
BP is currently waiting for a cement plug to dry so it can resume work on a relief well which will finally “kill” the well by injecting mud and cement in from below.
Mr Suttles said an enormous amount of cleanup remains on shore and BP – which has taken a major reputational hit – is committed to the long-term recovery of the region.
He declined to rule out the possibility of drilling elsewhere in the rich reservoir.
“What we’ve stated is the original well that had the blow out and the relief wells will be abandoned,” Mr Suttles explained.