The Moscow Fire Service responded to around a hundred incidents on Sunday Dec. 9, including a major fire at the Museum of Modern History on Tverskaya that required the attention of no less than 15 crews.

The service faces the same demands and hazards as its counterparts everywhere, but with a fraction of the resources most other European capitals enjoy.

Like most Russian public services, the fire service suffers from a lack of funding. Spending on all emergency services was only 1.4 percent of the national budget in 1997, rising to 1.6 percent in 1998 and falling again to 1.2 percent in 1999.

Firemen are paid only 2,000 rubles ($70) a month, and even senior officers only get twice that amount. The basic fireman's pension, after 20 years' service, is only $80 a month.

Col. Gennady Makarenko, chief of 33 Division, based at Maly Kislovsky Pereulok, just northwest of Lenin Library, has 25 years of experience with the fire service. His division is responsible for the area inside the inner ring road south of Tverskaya and north of the Moskva river. Some of his crews attended the Tverskaya museum fire last weekend.

Moscow Region has 90 fire stations, with 12,000 firefighters. Makarenko's 33 division employs 150 personnel of whom 70 are firefighters, with the remainder being support, communications and engineering staff. Firemen work a 24-hour shift, followed by three days off.

All the firefighters are male, unlike in many Western countries. When told that in the U.K. women are employed as firefighters, Makarenko expressed surprise. "This is not work for women," he said.

Inevitably, the low pay affects recruitment. "We don't get enough of the ex-military people we would like," Makarenko said. "Of course, people don't want to work for such a low salary after leaving the forces."

Firemen, who are also recruited from a civilian background, do a month of basic training, followed by a further three months on a specialized firefighting course before they are qualified.

Lack of funding also means that equipment is often outdated or worn-out.

"If we had more money, the first thing I would change would be our equipment, particularly the personal equipment like our firefighting clothing and breathing apparatus. The fire engines themselves are also inferior to foreign ones.

In the 1980s the Moscow service used some German tenders made in the DDR, and they were much more convenient and pleasant to work in than ours," Makarenko said.

"Most of ours are only a few years old, but they are not that good. Again, the problem is money – even a new Russian fire engine costs $20,000. I wouldn't say our equipment prevents us doing the job, but better equipment would allow us to do it more effectively," he added.

The Western equivalent tenders Makarenko would like cost several times as much as Russian vehicles.

Makarenko speaks from experience – he has visited Swedish fire stations, and Swedish and American firefighters have visited his station on exchange.

Surprisingly, the communications links with the emergency switchboards are efficient even though they are also far from new.

"I can say with some pride that our communications system is very good," Makarenko said.

He picked up a stopwatch, dialed 01, and waited for an answer from the operator, which came in around 10 seconds.

"We have a set standard reaction time of one minute to be on our way to an incident from the time of a call to us," Makarenko said. "We aim to be at the scene within another three minutes. Of course, this depends on traffic conditions above all. Moscow is very congested during the day, and we are held up like everybody else."

In other European countries with more modern equipment, reaction times are similar. In the U.K., the fire service in Greater Manchester aims to get its first pump to a fire in as little as five minutes for a high risk category incident, such as at a shopping complex or cinema, and a maximum 20 minutes for low priority incidents.

Each season naturally brings different problems for the firefighters, Makarenko said.

"We deal with more fires outdoors in summer, but in winter we have incidents to deal with where homeless people are getting into buildings and burning things to keep warm," he explained.

With no obvious source of more funding in sight, it seems Moscow's firemen are likely to be called out to battle with such incidents with the same equipment for some time to come.