For two days, 1,700 firefighters struggled to overcome more than twenty forest fires which left at least 38 dead and 200 injured.
Le Monde with AFP
The fires that ravaged part of Algeria on Wednesday and Thursday and Thursday, killing at least 38 dead, are all “completely mastered”, announced, Friday, August 19, Farouk Achour, Deputy Director Information and civil protection statistics.
The provisional official assessment is 37 dead – including 11 children – but several local media reported a 38
For two days, some 1,700 firefighters fought to overcome more than twenty forest fires which also made around 200 injured, some of which are severely burned.
The Ministry of Justice opened an investigation to determine whether certain fires were of criminal origin. The prosecution of Souk Ahras, in the east of the country, where an entire family perished in the flames, announced the arrest of a pyromaniac in a forest near this city of 500,000 inhabitants. More than 350 families fled their accommodation, and a hospital close to a wooded area had to be evacuated.
150 fires since the beginning of August 2>
Experts have criticized gaps in the fire-fighting system, including a lack of water bombers and poorly maintained forests.
Since the beginning of August, there have been nearly 150 fires in Algeria which have destroyed hundreds of hectares of forests and copse.
Each year, northern Algeria is affected by forest fires, but this phenomenon increases from year to year under the effect of climate change. Global warming increases the probability of heat waves and droughts and, by ricochet, fires. It was about 48 ° C Wednesday in El Tarf, Guelma and Souk Ahras.
The summer of 2021 has been the deadliest since Algerian independence: at least eighty people died in forest fires that ravaged the north, where more than 100,000 hectares of coppice left in smoke.