jet_porkins
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Russia’s heat wave is almost one month old, and is showing no signs of letting up.
Air conditioner suppliers caught by surprise by the high temperatures have run out of stock, and home appliance stores have back-orders of up to three weeks (two companies declined our request to film people looking for air-conditioners in their stores because they didn’t want us to show empty shelves).
This is the sad part:
Muscovites still do a pretty good job of escaping it, though. Any part of Moscow that has water – fountains, the river, even barge canals – has been full of people swimming and sunbathing.
But the Russian Emergency Ministry’s web site shows perhaps the harshest measure of the heat wave: the death toll. Over 2,000 people have drowned in Russia since June 1.
And this past Monday broke an unfortunate record: 71 people drowned in a 24-hour period.
According to Vadim Seryogin, a ministry official, many of the cases are due to people swimming while drunk.
Apparently they're expecting to lose about $1 billion in lost farmland.
Maybe they'll think twice before going for a "cold one" the next time such a bizarre heat wave occurs.