Thirty-four people including 10 soldiers have been killed by wildfires in the mountainous Béjaïa and Bouïra regions of Algeria, as a heatwave spreads across north Africa and southern Europe.
About 8,000 firefighters were trying to bring the flames under control, authorities said, adding that about 1,500 people had been evacuated.
Algeria’s interior ministry said operations were under way to put out fires in six provinces and asked for people to “avoid areas affected by the fires” and to report new blazes on freephone numbers.
“Civil protection services remain mobilised until the fires are completely extinguished,” the ministry said.
The defence ministry said 10 soldiers were killed in the fires, but provided no further details.
Fires frequently rage through forests and fields in Algeria in summer, and this year they have been exacerbated by a heatwave that has broken temperature records in several Mediterranean countries.
The climate crisis is supercharging extreme weather across the world, leading to more frequent and more deadly disasters from heatwaves to floods to wildfires.
In some other north African countries such as Morocco and Libya, temperatures were relatively normal compared with annual averages. However, in Tunisia, it neared 50C on Monday and the state-owned energy company STEG announced planned power cuts of of between 30 minutes and an hour in an effort to preserve the electricity network’s performance.
In August last year, huge fires killed 37 people in Algeria’s north-east El Tarf province. The previous summer, 90 people were killed in such fires.
In an attempt to avoid a repeat of previous years’ death tolls, the authorities announced a series of measures in the months leading up to peak summer heat. These included the acquisition of six medium-sized waterbombing aircraft and the construction of landing strips for helicopters and fire-fighting drones.
Scientists rank the Mediterranean region as a climate crisis “hot spot”, with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning of more heatwaves, crop failures, droughts, rising seas and influxes of invasive species.
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
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