The preventive measures taken by the authorities do not allow to dispel the anxiety of a population traumatized by the tragedy of the summer of 2021, which had caused the death of 103 people.
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“We have resumed the village festivals and the weddings, but the heart is not there. The sadness and the fear that it starts again are there”, blows Khalifa Graichi, president of the village committee of Aït Abdelmoumene , in the Tizi Ouzou region. In 2021, gigantic fires had ravaged northern Algeria. In the space of ten days, between August 9 and 18, more than 100,000 hectares of vegetation had been reduced to ashes and 103 people had been killed, including 24 soldiers dispatched to turn off the lights, according to the Ministry of Defense.
Should we fear a reissue of the disaster? In the wilayas (prefectures) of Skikda, Sétif and Mostaganem, the fires of June and July have already claimed the lives of four people. “All the inhabitants are anxious, not only those who lived fires last year,” worries Zahir Benkhellat, teacher and member of the association SOS Animaux et Environnement, in Akbou, in the wilaya of Béjaïa.
Very criticized for their lack of responsiveness and the weakness of the means deployed to deal with the tragedy, the authorities adopted this year a set of preventive measures. A bomber of water Beriev be-200 has been rented while waiting for the four seaplanes of the same model ordered from the Russian manufacturer and which will not be delivered before next year, the Ministry of the Interior said. The Walis (prefects) were responsible for installing additional water points in the main forest massifs in order to allow helicopters to get supplies quickly in the event of intervention. For its part, the Ministry of Agriculture put into service a toll -free number to “report any danger” which could cause a start of fire.
But it is too little to reassure a population still in shock. “We lived a lot of natural disasters: the floods of Bab El-Oued in 2001, the earthquake in Boumerdès in 2003, and last year these forest fires, but it is as if the public authorities did not shoot De Listern, regrets Zahir Benkhellat. They do downside when we need a new ecological policy in line with current issues. Environmental laws have not changed since the 1980s. “
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