Amid Heat and Smoke, Deaths Double in Moscow
By ANDREW E. KRAMER NY TIMES 
MOSCOW — The daily mortality rate here has nearly doubled in recent days, the city’s chief health official said Monday, singling out the heat as the primary factor and not the culprit most people here suspected: the choking cloud of wildfire smoke.
The acknowledgment at once confirmed a flurry of rumors that bodies were beginning to pile up in morgues and gave rise to a new one in which the authorities, possibly trying to ward off a panicked exodus, were engaging in a Soviet-style whitewash of the health risks of the smoke.
In any event, people are leaving Moscow. By Monday, all train tickets to St. Petersburg, to the north and mostly out of the smoke, had been sold out, Vesti state television reported.
After denying statements from morgue workers and doctors last week that the morgues were filling, the health official, Andrei Seltsovsky, did an about-face. Speaking at a City Council meeting that was broadcast on national television, he said that the daily death toll had risen from an average of between 360 and 380 to “around 700.” Ambulance calls were up by about a quarter, he said, because of increases in heart and lung ailments and strokes.
“This is no secret,” Mr. Seltsovsky said, seeming to acknowledge that the previous official silence on the death toll had been setting off rumors of a cover-up. “Everybody thinks we’re making secrets out of it.”
“Abroad,” he added, “people drown like flies, and no one asks questions.”
The questions had been mounting in Moscow since Thursday, when the state Russian Information Agency reported a sharp rise in bodies arriving at city morgues. The Internet swirled with posts saying that the mortality rate had as much as quintupled.
Mr. Seltsovsky called those reports “outrageous” at the time, and he told the Interfax news agency that “there is no need to sow panic.” He said hospital admittances and ambulance calls were about normal.
On Friday, Russia’s chief public health official, Gennady Onishchenko, reinforced this message by denying any increase in Moscow’s mortality rates. “I am not going to confirm the alarmist data on the Internet,” he said.
But on Monday, a posting by a Russian doctor on a social networking site said that the refrigerator in the hospital’s morgue had run out of space, and that bodies were being laid out on the floor.
Throughout the day, ambulances could be seen weaving slowly through the eerily light traffic on Moscow’s thoroughfares, their emergency lights piercing the thick smoke, which had lifted somewhat by evening. And with the stultifying heat, conditions were reported to be deteriorating in hospitals. The Web site of the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reported that one maternity ward provided air-conditioning in the doctors’ offices but not the delivery rooms.
Russia’s chief weather forecaster said there was no relief in sight from the hot weather, though an expected change in wind direction Wednesday might thin the smoke cloud.
To the east of the capital, meanwhile, Russian officials were compelled to declare a state of emergency at a nuclear research center, Snezhinsk in the Ural Mountains, where the surrounding forests were dry and fire-prone.
Earlier this month, they had cautioned that fires might stir up fallout from Chernobyl if they burned into contaminated areas, potentially lacing the smoke with radioactive particles.
Russian health officials said early on that the effect of the fine particles and carbon monoxide in Moscow’s smoky atmosphere was comparable to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. In other contexts, studies have shown that peat moss — the source of much of the smoke — concentrates heavy metals from the environment, which are released in its smoke, though it was unclear whether this was the case with the bogs burning outside Moscow.
Independent doctors said a rise in mortality was to be expected and was hardly exceptional for a heat wave in a northern city ill equipped for such temperatures, even without accounting for the deleterious effect of the smoke cloud. Temperatures have been in the high 90s for weeks.
But older Muscovites said the delayed official acknowledgment of the mortality rate recalled the Soviet tendency to whitewash bad news, tragedy or disaster. In 1986, for instance, Soviet health authorities denied for days that radiation had leaked from the Chernobyl nuclear plant, even allowing schoolchildren to march in nearby May Day parades so as not to depart from the approved story line.
MOSCOW — The daily mortality rate here has nearly doubled in recent days, the city’s chief health official said Monday, singling out the heat as the primary factor and not the culprit most people here suspected: the choking cloud of wildfire smoke.
The acknowledgment at once confirmed a flurry of rumors that bodies were beginning to pile up in morgues and gave rise to a new one in which the authorities, possibly trying to ward off a panicked exodus, were engaging in a Soviet-style whitewash of the health risks of the smoke.
In any event, people are leaving Moscow. By Monday, all train tickets to St. Petersburg, to the north and mostly out of the smoke, had been sold out, Vesti state television reported.
After denying statements from morgue workers and doctors last week that the morgues were filling, the health official, Andrei Seltsovsky, did an about-face. Speaking at a City Council meeting that was broadcast on national television, he said that the daily death toll had risen from an average of between 360 and 380 to “around 700.” Ambulance calls were up by about a quarter, he said, because of increases in heart and lung ailments and strokes.
“This is no secret,” Mr. Seltsovsky said, seeming to acknowledge that the previous official silence on the death toll had been setting off rumors of a cover-up. “Everybody thinks we’re making secrets out of it.”
“Abroad,” he added, “people drown like flies, and no one asks questions.”
The questions had been mounting in Moscow since Thursday, when the state Russian Information Agency reported a sharp rise in bodies arriving at city morgues. The Internet swirled with posts saying that the mortality rate had as much as quintupled.
Mr. Seltsovsky called those reports “outrageous” at the time, and he told the Interfax news agency that “there is no need to sow panic.” He said hospital admittances and ambulance calls were about normal.
On Friday, Russia’s chief public health official, Gennady Onishchenko, reinforced this message by denying any increase in Moscow’s mortality rates. “I am not going to confirm the alarmist data on the Internet,” he said.
But on Monday, a posting by a Russian doctor on a social networking site said that the refrigerator in the hospital’s morgue had run out of space, and that bodies were being laid out on the floor.
Throughout the day, ambulances could be seen weaving slowly through the eerily light traffic on Moscow’s thoroughfares, their emergency lights piercing the thick smoke, which had lifted somewhat by evening. And with the stultifying heat, conditions were reported to be deteriorating in hospitals. The Web site of the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reported that one maternity ward provided air-conditioning in the doctors’ offices but not the delivery rooms.
Russia’s chief weather forecaster said there was no relief in sight from the hot weather, though an expected change in wind direction Wednesday might thin the smoke cloud.
To the east of the capital, meanwhile, Russian officials were compelled to declare a state of emergency at a nuclear research center, Snezhinsk in the Ural Mountains, where the surrounding forests were dry and fire-prone.
Earlier this month, they had cautioned that fires might stir up fallout from Chernobyl if they burned into contaminated areas, potentially lacing the smoke with radioactive particles.
Russian health officials said early on that the effect of the fine particles and carbon monoxide in Moscow’s smoky atmosphere was comparable to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. In other contexts, studies have shown that peat moss — the source of much of the smoke — concentrates heavy metals from the environment, which are released in its smoke, though it was unclear whether this was the case with the bogs burning outside Moscow.
Independent doctors said a rise in mortality was to be expected and was hardly exceptional for a heat wave in a northern city ill equipped for such temperatures, even without accounting for the deleterious effect of the smoke cloud. Temperatures have been in the high 90s for weeks.
But older Muscovites said the delayed official acknowledgment of the mortality rate recalled the Soviet tendency to whitewash bad news, tragedy or disaster. In 1986, for instance, Soviet health authorities denied for days that radiation had leaked from the Chernobyl nuclear plant, even allowing schoolchildren to march in nearby May Day parades so as not to depart from the approved story line.
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