Most of the fires that broke out on Friday in Algeria in the areas of Tizi Ouzou and Béjaïa, in Kabylie (northeast), were under control last night. Dozens of residents were nevertheless evacuated, according to the Civil Protection.
Residents, whose number has not been specified, were evacuated as fires approached localities in the wilaya (prefecture) of Tizi Ozou, declared the director general of forests, Djamel Touahria, quoted by the news site Ennahar Online.
Since Friday, numerous fires have broken out in the center-east of the Tizi Ouzou region, but most of the fires have been brought under control thanks to significant human and material resources, both land and air, according to Civil Protection.
” The situation is under control even if fires persist in areas that are difficult to access,” said Nassim Bernaoui, a Civil Protection official, met by our colleagues at AFP in Aït Frah, around 25 kilometers from Tizi Ouzou.
More than 800 firefighters, 187 emergency vehicles, and seven aircraft were deployed to fight the fires that consumed olive groves and fig plantations and destroyed chicken coops, beehives, and some homes, AFP found.
According to an initial assessment by Tizi Ouzou Forest Conservation Services, hundreds of hectares of vegetation were destroyed by these fires.
” The flames reached Aït Frah on Saturday around 9:00 p.m. (8:00 p.m. GMT). The residents hastily began clearing brush to prevent the fire from spreading to other villages,” Farid Farih, a local resident, told AFP. Along with a dozen other residents of the village, they supported the firefighters for several hours.
Panic
” We came here to provide first aid to citizens but also to help them through an ordeal that has caused panic in the region,” said Abdelmalek Mohamed, a volunteer with the Algerian Red Crescent.
In Bejaïa, the authorities ordered the evacuation of around twenty families from the village of Mezouara, located near the Akfadou forest, where the fire broke out on Sunday.
According to videos posted on social media, a water bomber plane made several drops on this forest massif.
Every summer, northern Algeria is affected by forest fires, a phenomenon that is increasing year after year due to climate change, causing droughts and heat waves that weaken vegetation.
At the end of July 2023, fires ravaged the northeast of the country, particularly the Bejaïa region, killing at least 34 people and destroying thousands of hectares of forests and crops as well as hundreds of homes.
In August 2022, massive fires in the same region killed 37 people around El Tarf.
The summer of 2021 was the deadliest in decades: more than 90 people died in forest fires that devastated the north of the country.
