Wildfires rage on in five provinces in Turkey

Fires continue to burn in forest areas in Muğla, Aydın, Isparta, Karabük and Burdur provinces as 13 wildfires have yet to be taken under control, Turkish Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli said on Saturday.

There are eight fires still burning in Muğla, the ministry said in a statement. The southwestern tourism province’s Milas and Marmaris districts remain the most affected in the area.

A total of 83,810 hectares (207,099 acres) of forest area has burned down in the fires that started on July 28, Gebze Technical University researchers told state-run Anadolu Agency.

The fire in the southern Antalya province’s Manavgat district encompassed some 140,850 acres to date, GTU’s topographical engineering researchers said, based on analyses of European Space Agency’s Sentinel 2 satellite imagery. The Manavgat fire has gone down in history as the greatest fire disaster in Turkey, they said.

Muğla’s Gökova, home to many bays and coves, suffered greatly in the fires.

Gökova'nın cennet koyları Mazı, İnce Yalı, Taş Yalı, Çökertme, Geren, Ören, Türkevleri, Kissebükü ve Ören yanıp kül oldu. Yaşanan facianın boyutu havadan drone ile görüntülendi. pic.twitter.com/WYAPQvrMuM

— Cumhur84 (@CmhrVrdr84) August 7, 2021

“More than 50,000 acres of forests burned down, and we still don’t know where it will stop,” Muğla local Ayhan Karahan told daily BirGün newspaper. Residents in the area fear a wave of real estate development to hit the now-blackened coastline. “We don’t believe in promises of reforestation,” Karahan said. “That is what they said for the burned area 10, 20 years ago, but they put up concrete walls.”

Chambers of Electronics Engineers, Chemical Engineers, Mining Engineers and Mechanical Engineers issued a joint statement on Saturday, condemning what they called the government’s incompetence in disaster management and called for the protection of coal mines and thermal power plants.

Turkey has left its own fire fighting planes inactive and chosen to rent planes from other countries at exorbitant prices, instead of buying new planes, the engineers said.

In the last 12 years, the amount of scorched area per wildfire has gone up by a staggering 141.6 percent, forestry policy expert Dr Erdoğan Atmış wrote for BirGün, showing a failure in disaster management.

The largest increase happened in the last three years, with 58.7 percent, Atmış said. The increase coincides with the appointment of current Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli, he added, however, it also coincides with ministers losing much of their authority to the president in Turkey abandoning its parliamentary system in favour of an executive presidential one.