Flood death toll rises in Turkey as new fires erupt on Greek island of Evia | Europe

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The death toll from floods in Turkey has reached 27, and new forest fires are raging on the devastated Greek island of Evia, as southern Europe braces for more severe weather events due to man-made climate change.

Heat waves in the Mediterranean have ignited fires that have devastated parts of Italy, Turkey and Algeria, with Spain and Portugal on high alert, while Turkey’s Black Sea region has experienced some of the worst floods in living memory.

Turkish emergency workers battled on Friday to relieve the worst-hit areas, as the country’s northern provinces plunged into chaos as authorities announced two weeks of wildfires that have raged in their southern coastal regions, killing eight people.

Floods dumped dozens of cars and piles of rubble in the streets, destroyed bridges, closed roads and cut off electricity supplies to some 330 villages, and more than 1,700 people were evacuated, some with the help of helicopters and boats.

“This is the worst flood disaster I’ve seen,” Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said after surveying the damage that extended across Bartin, Kastamonu and Sinop provinces. “The danger our citizens face is high.”

Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, Bekir Bakdemirli, said the region was facing a “disaster we had not seen in 50 or 100 years”, with forecasters predicting more heavy rains in the coming hours and days.

Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said 25 people died as a result of the floods in Kastamonu and two more people died in Sinop. Five bridges collapsed and many were damaged.

Rescue operation in Bozkurt, Kastamonu, Turkey. Photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

“I am 75 years old and have never seen anything like this,” Adem Şenol, a resident of Bartin County, told Anadolu Agency. “The water rose above the level of our windows, smashed our door, even the wall.”

Natural disasters, which scientists agree have become more severe and frequent due to global warming caused by harmful emissions, pose a challenge to Turkey’s powerful president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, two years before general elections.

Erdogan, who was due to visit the flood-affected region late Friday, has come under fire on social media for his response to the bushfires in July, and polls show climate is a top priority, especially for young voters.

Elsewhere, high temperatures and low humidity continued to create ideal conditions for wildfires, with a new fire raging on Greece’s second largest island, Evia, just south of the region where a massive wildfire burned 50,000 hectares (15,000 acres) of pine forests and countless countless others. from the forests. Role.

The Greek fire service said four firefighting planes and six helicopters were responding to the new fire in central Evia along with 23 firefighters and 10 vehicles. The largest fire, which broke out on August 3, devastated much of the north of the island and was still burning on Friday.

Two other large fires are still burning in the Peloponnese region of southern Greece, with hundreds of French, German, Austrian and Czech firefighters helping their fellow Greeks.

Drone footage shows the effects of the Evia forest fires in Greece – video

Civil Protection spokesperson Spyros Georgios said the multinational firefighting force assisting Greece will remain in place. The Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, described the Greek fires as “the biggest environmental disaster in Greece in decades”.

Several other Mediterranean countries have suffered from wildfires in recent weeks. In Italy, firefighters intervened hundreds of times in Sicily, which on Wednesday recorded the highest temperature believed to be Europe’s highest ever at 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 degrees Fahrenheit), and in the southern region of Calabria. Locals were evacuated from Tivoli, east of Rome, on Friday.

And in Spain, where temperatures are expected to reach 46 degrees Celsius in some places this weekend, firefighters on Friday put out a fire in Catalonia but another fire continued near the northwestern town of Rubbia.

Almost the entire country faced a high, very high or extreme risk of wildfires on Friday, the Spanish meteorological office, AEMET, said, with 15 of the 17 autonomous regions on alert for high temperatures.

The Portuguese government has put 14 of the country’s 18 regions on fire alert, with Prime Minister Antonio Costa warning that the next few days will be difficult, while fires have killed 71 people in northern Algeria and dozens of fires have been recorded since Monday. Tunisia.

Exacerbating drought and heat linked to climate change have fueled wildfires in the western United States and in Russia’s northern Siberia region, where a state of emergency was declared Friday to mobilize firefighting resources from other Russian regions.

On Friday, officials reported 117 active forest fires burning across nearly 1.4 million hectares in the vast Sakha region in northeastern Siberia, also known as Yakutia, which covers more than 308 million hectares. Experts said a 2007 decision to dismantle a national air network tasked with monitoring the fires contributed to the disaster.

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