Forest fires destroy 800 hectares in Latvia

RIGA: Fires raging for five days have destroyed more than 800 hectares of western Latvia, authorities said Sunday, with continuing extreme temperatures hampering firefighters’ efforts.

Satellite images showed the fires have wiped out 170 acres of forest, 257 hectares of scrubland and nearly 400 hectares of peatland.

A peat fire in the Courland region broke out last Tuesday and spread eastwards, with the smoke noticeable in the resort town of Jurmala, more than 100 kilometres away in the neighbouring Riga region.

“Peatland fires burn downward, but when there’s wind, which brings oxygen, the fires can erupt into flames,” Latvian fire services spokesman Inta Palkavniece told reporters.

“The main goal is to prevent the fires from spreading,” he added.

The fire services said on its website that firefighting efforts would be ‘long and troublesome’.

“The weather is unfavourable to firefighting and will remain so over the next days,” it said.

The Courland region is sparsely populated, with few roads and many areas inaccessible because of its vast marshes.

Residents of Stikli, a village that was evacuated because of the fire, began to return home after the wind changed ‘of their own accord’, the mayor of its municipality Ventspils, Aivars Mucenieks, told reporters.

Pupils of a school for disabled children in Stikli will not return until the situation is fully under control, he added.

Meteorologists warned that the high temperatures are persisting and no rain is expected for the next two weeks.

Latvia has experienced severe drought over the last few months, prompting authorities to declare a natural catastrophe in the agricultural sector.

The Baltic country has not yet asked for help from other European countries and has no proposals to do so for the time being.

But other countries in Europe have been in the grip of an unusually long heatwave for recent weeks with little prospect of rain for the time being.

In Sweden, where temperatures are the highest for a century, farmers are even sending their animals to slaughter because there is no hay left to feed them.

It has asked for help from other European countries, because of the lack of manpower and capacity to tackle such natural catastrophes.

Poland has asked the EU for financial aid after more than 91,000 farms were affected by an unusual spring drought, according to the agriculture ministry. — AFP