By Pail Nicholson
November 12 – As part of its 2018 World Cup planning the Russian emergencies ministry is setting up special task groups in FIFA World Cup host cities.
While Russia has problems with violence and racism in its domestic championship – problems it insists it is addressing – the special emergency task forces are designed to deal with disaster situations in the first instance, and especially fire and rescue situations.
To create the special task force, the Ministry for Emergency Situations and Civil Defence will be granted an extra 6 billion rubles ($130.4 million) from the federal budget over the next three years. The new units will be established in cities that are hosting World Cup games.
“We’re imparting new contours to the firefighting and rescue units, which will be in charge of extinguishing and localization of fires and, on top of that, will take part in search and rescue operations,” Deputy Minister Vladimir Stepanov told the newspaper. “Servicemen of the units will also be employed at other jobs where they specialized skills may be needed.”
The new units will have the latest equipment and technologies and will be able to react rapidly not only with large vehicles but also on motorcycles that will enable officers to get to an incident fast.
At present, the Ministry for Emergency Situations has a minimum 100 to 200 people in every region who can respond to an incident. These levels are not considered high enough for a major international sports event.
FIFA World Cup 2018 games will be held in Moscow, Kaliningrad, Sochi, St. Petersburg, Volgograd, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Saransk Rostov-on-Don, and Yekaterinburg.
Facial recognition system at Luzhniki
Once completed, the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow will have a face recognition system. The system will refuse entry for fans that are on ‘black lists’. The system will be able to identify fans that previously violated orders against them using a database of photos. In some cases, the system will be able to identify a person at the time of buying tickets, as some tickets will require passport when buying them.
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