(Reuters) – A wildfire has spread to a gunpowder depot in Russia’s Urals mountains setting it ablaze and forcing the evacuation of a small village in the Sverdlovsk region, local officials said Saturday evening.
According to preliminary information, there have been no casualties in the fire that has spread across 960 square metres (10,300 square feet), Sverdlovsk’s ministry of emergency situations said on its Telegram messaging channel.
A state of emergency was introduced in the Rezhevsky administrative district of the region, where the depot was located in a small village of Pervomaisky, the region’s administration said, adding that there was a threat the fire will spread to other nearby villages.
Earlier, Yevgeny Kuyvashev, governor of the Sverdlovsk region, said in posts on social media that the situation with the wildfires in the region “was critical,” spreading across 20 thousand hectares (77 square miles) and aggravated by dry and strong winds.
Last week, at least one person was killed and hundreds of people were left homeless when a fire of unknown origin swept through a village in the Sverdlovsk region.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Daniel Wallis)