MOSCOW — Muscovites are fleeing the Russian capital in record numbers as extreme heat combined with acrid smoke from wildfires, slowing trading on the city’s main stock exchange and emptying restaurants.

More than 104,400 people flew out of Moscow on Sunday, topping the previous 2010 record of 101,000, according to the Federal Air Transportation Agency. On Aug. 7, 95,000 left the city by plane, 20 percent more than the year-earlier date, agency spokesman Sergei Izvolsky said by telephone Monday.

Moscow set a daily heat record of 95.5 degrees Fahrenheit at 3 p.m. Monday, the seventh such record this month and the 19th of the summer, said Tatyana Pozdnyakova, a spokeswoman for the city’s weather service.

The heat wave, smoke from forest fires across central Russia and the Volga River region, and the country’s worst drought in half a century have combined to hobble agriculture and slow the services industry and manufacturing. Financial companies are now affected.

Some Moscow banks reduced working hours in response to the searing heat and smog, driving trading on the Micex Stock Exchange to $722 million on Friday, the lowest level since July 9, Bloomberg data show.

JPMorgan Chase and Alfa Bank, Russia’s biggest private lender, canceled daily research reports Monday as employees left Moscow or remained home.

Advertisement

Restaurants in the capital are struggling to attract customers as residents stay home or leave town to beat the heat.

“The entire business is at a standstill,” Alexander Ivanov, vice president of the Moscow-based Federation of Restaurateurs and Hoteliers, said by telephone. “I don’t have statistics, but if there aren’t any people, what business are we talking about?”

Drought has forced the government to declare states of emergency in 28 crop-producing regions. Agriculture accounts for about 4 percent of gross domestic product, according to Moscow- based VTB Capital. Russia, the world’s third-biggest grower of wheat, banned grain exports to the end of the year as crops wither.

In the Chelyabinsk region, a fire emergency was declared in Ozyorsk, site of the Mayak center for processing and storage of spent nuclear fuel, the local government said on its website.

The heat wave that has plagued central Russia since June is the worst in the country’s history, said Alexander Frolov, head of Rosgidromet, the federal weather service. “In 1,000 years, neither we nor our ancestors have observed or recorded anything like this sort of heat,” he said.

In Moscow, the heat and smoke nearly doubled the city’s death rate to about 700 a day from 360 to 380 in normal conditions, Interfax reported, citing Andrei Seltsovsky, head of the city’s public health department.

 


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.