Turkey faces ‘very risky week' for wildfires

Yahoo

2 days ago

Turkey faces a 'very risky week' for wildfires, an official said, as blazes across parts of south-east Europe and the Balkans damaged homes and led to a huge firefighting operation that included evacuations.
Nearly 100 people face prosecution over the fires in Turkey.
Blazes erupted near Bursa, Turkey's fourth-largest city, over the weekend.
A wildfire to the north east of Bursa had been largely extinguished, but one to the south of the city continued, although its intensity had been 'significantly reduced', forestry minister Ibrahim Yumakli told reporters in Ankara.
He also said a fire that has been burning for six days in Karabuk, in north-west Turkey, had 'been reduced in intensity', and a blaze in Karamanmaras in the south had largely been brought under control.
A wildfire also erupted on Monday in forests outside the western port city of Izmir, where 11 aircraft were helping ground-based fire units and residents battle the blaze.
'We are in a very risky week,' Mr Yumakli said of the wildfires.
In Greece, firefighters raced to tackle a wildfire that broke out on Monday near a university campus close to the centre of Athens.
Water-dropping planes and helicopters buzzed over the city centre as they headed to the wildfire near the National Technical University of Athens, located in foothills ringing the Greek capital.
In all, 11 planes and eight helicopters were reinforcing 110 firefighters on the ground, the fire department said.
Police announced road closures in the area, including to the only highway that circles the city.
A waning fire on the island of Kythera, which lies south of the Peloponnese, was reinvigorated by strong winds.
Over the weekend, the blaze burned through around 10% of the small island's land mass, triggering the evacuation of several villages.
A Turkish firefighting team of 22 personnel and five vehicles crossed the northern border on Monday to assist Bulgarian crews fighting a large fire near the village of Lesovo, which was evacuated.
The blaze was one of hundreds across Bulgaria, the most severe of which was near the south-western village of Strumyani.
The Interior Ministry described the fire as 'extremely large' and 'widespread', leading to 200 firefighters being withdrawn because of the effects of high winds on the fire.
Several villages have been extensively damaged, with dozens of homes burned to the ground.
By Monday, 269 fires had been extinguished in the previous 24 hours, the government said.
Other European Union countries have responded to Bulgaria's requests for help, sending firefighting helicopters and planes.
In several instances, the causes of fires have been determined to be carelessness by people, such as open fires and discarded cigarettes.
Senior Interior Ministry official Miroslav Rashkov said that two people had been arrested for deliberately starting fires and would be prosecuted.
Turkey has been fighting severe wildfires since late June.
In Bursa, three volunteer firefighters were killed after their water tanker overturned, local news agency IHA reported.
One died at the scene and the two others were pulled from the tanker and taken to hospital but died late on Sunday.
The volunteer crew from the province of Bolu was on its way to the village of Aglasan, north east of Bursa, to combat a blaze when the vehicle fell into a ditch beside a rough forest track, the agency reported.
Separately, officials said earlier on Sunday a firefighter died of a heart attack while battling a blaze.
The fatalities brought the total deaths over the past month to 17, including 10 rescue volunteers and forestry workers killed on Wednesday in a fire in the western city of Eskisehir.
The huge blazes around Bursa forced more than 3,500 people to flee their homes.
While firefighting teams have contained the damage to a limited number of homes across affected areas in Turkey, vast tracts of forest have been turned to ash.
Unseasonably high temperatures, dry conditions and strong winds have been fuelling the wildfires.
Turkey and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean are experiencing record-breaking heat waves.
The government had earlier declared disaster areas in two western provinces, Izmir and Bilecik.
Turkey battled at least 44 separate fires on Sunday, Mr Yumakli said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday that 99 suspects faced prosecution in relation to the wildfires.
In Albania, firefighters battled at least six separate wildfires on Monday, the Defence Ministry said.
Two weeks of blazes have ravaged thousands of hectares of forest in the Balkan country.
The areas most at risk were in the north east, where inaccessible mountain plateaus had water-dropping aircraft carrying out the bulk of the firefighting.
In the country's southern region, overnight winds ignited blazes in the municipalities of Delvine and Konispol and in the Himare district on the Adriatic coast, which suffered wildfires last week.
Authorities said that at least a dozen people were arrested over the weekend over the wildfires.