Evgeny Zinichev, Minister of the Russian Ministry of Emergencies (EMERCOM), led the operation, which included flying over the territory, a crew inspection and coordination meeting. Pavel Livinskiy, Director General of Rosseti, also held a working meeting with Igor Rudenya, Tver Region’s Governor. 

During the coordinating meeting, Pavel Livinskiy reported on measures taken to prepare the power grid facilities for fire hazard periods and specific activities carried out in Tver Region.

According to Pavel Livinskiy, “Rosseti Group implemented a risk-oriented approach to assessing the fire safety of regions. This allows us to effectively choose a set of steps to ensure safe and reliable supply of power to consumers.”

Tverenergo, a branch of Rosseti Center, is implementing the scheduled for 2018-2020 clearing of more than 19 thousand hectares and expanding more than 2 thousand hectares of cut lines for overhead lines with a voltage up to 110 KV. About 1.1 billion rubles were allocated to strengthen fire safety in 2018–2020.

Participants supported the strategy of Rosseti to further consolidate electric grid assets in the regions of its presence. This will result in increased reliability of power supply and improved quality of services.

Evgeny Zinichev, EMERCOM’s head, laid particular emphasis on issues of interagency cooperation when organizing both preventive measures and extinguishing natural fires in adjacent territories. “We are concerned about the readiness for the fire hazard period of unattended electric grid facilities, grids owned by garden nonprofit partnerships and small territorial grid organizations. We need to address the issue of grid consolidation, which will allow applying uniform requirements to all grid assets in terms of technical condition and power supply reliability,” noted Mr. Zinichev.

The meeting acknowledged that the fire hazard situation develops in accordance with a long-term forecast and remains stable. 

Igor Rudenya, Tver Region’s Governor, declared that, “We have built a multi-level system of protection against forest fires. We declared a special fire hazard period on March 27, which will last until July 1^st. We ensured that we have the required people and equipment, and we implement preventive measures in cooperation with heads of municipalities. In particular, this is how we managed to stabilize the situation with grassland fires. We also allocated additional funds so that EMERCOM’s helicopters can be used to patrol forests.”