“If the legislation allowed us to respond quickly. Now we have situations where a permit is required to assess protected areas – which is fine in a normal situation. But in a situation where there could be an even greater disaster than we currently have. We could make minimal such interventions and need to review the legislation,” Algirdas Pieniuta said to BNS after a meeting in the Seimas regarding the damage caused by the severe storm to the forests of Dzūkija and the elimination of its consequences.
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He emphasized that there is currently no great danger, but if a fire breaks out, it would be difficult to control.
“Today there is no great danger – the fire hazard class is three out of five. It is not that we have a ticking bomb, but if we had two weeks of drought, my main fear is that if a fire occurs, we simply would not be able to work there with equipment to extinguish the fire, people would not be able to get in to fight the fire, and the only option would be to isolate the fire source,” the deputy minister said.
“The main concern here is exactly the place where we have to think about how we will act in such situations in the future, because I do not believe that such situations will not recur or that they will not become more frequent with changing climate conditions. We must respond to an extraordinary situation in extraordinary ways,” added A. Pieniuta.
The deputy minister stressed that by legalizing a new procedure, it would be possible to manage stands that pose a potential threat to people, fire safety, and sanitary safety: “These are really exceptional cases. Not all fallen wood would necessarily be removed, but we see a situation where there is drought, a coniferous stand has collapsed, the crowns lie on the ground, and this is really very, very dangerous from a fire safety perspective. We must manage these areas without making unnecessary interventions in the protected area.”
The meeting convened by Seimas member Angelė Jakavonytė stated that some broken trees dangerously hang over the roadway.
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“The main problem is that some of these trees are hanging and most are hanging over the roadway or broken and hanging. So every time I drive by, I just think that there would be no wind so that the tree would not fall on a car or a pedestrian,” A. Jakavonytė said at the meeting.
The deputy mayor of Varėna district, Alvydas Verbickas, also emphasized that some trees could fall on people.
“Firefighters carried out tree removal, working for more than one day (…) – to clear so that people could arrive and leave safely… But right next to it (…) there are trees hanging 2-4 meters high, I am only talking about the road. That tree can fall at any time on a person or on the roadway,” A. Verbickas said at the meeting.
The deputy director of the Fire Protection and Rescue Department, Saulius Tamulevičius, said that tree removal work could last another month.
As BNS wrote on August 7, the forests of Druskininkai and Varėna were the most affected by the storm that swept southern Lithuania.
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