Power station faces threat from wildfire
MARMARIS, TURKEY: A roaring blaze raced toward a Turkish thermal power plant on Tuesday and farmers herded panicked cattle towards the sea as wildfires that have killed eight people raged on for a seventh day.
The nation of 84 million has been transfixed in horror as the most destructive wildfires in generations erase pristine forests and rich farmland across swaths of Turkey’s Mediterranean and Aegean coasts.
Frightened tourists have been forced to scamper onto boats for safety and dozens of villages have been evacuated as wild winds and soaring heat spread the flames.
An AFP team in the Aegean city of Marmaris saw farmers pulling their screaming animals out of burning barns and pulling them to the relative safety of the beach.
In neighbouring Greece, officials have blamed two smaller fires on the island of Rhodes and the Peloponnese peninsula on a record heatwave they link to climate change.
Temperature in excess of 40 degrees Celsius across the south of Turkey also set off a record surge in electricity use that caused power outages on Monday in cities such as Ankara and Istanbul.
Turkey’s energy ministry blamed the outages on droughtlike conditions that have emptied dams responsible for hydropower production and a “record level” in electricity use in the heat.
But the mayor of the Aegean coast city of Milas said he was more worried about what might happen should an uncontrolled fire raising massive plumes of smoke over the region engulf the local thermal power plant.
Milas mayor Muhammet Tokat tweeted an urgent series of messages showing the blazes spreading up a hill toward the presumed location of the plant. “This is a critical place,” he said in one video showing the blazes.
“The fire has reached the residential complexes,” he posted an hour later. “Going beyond this hill will mean that the fire will reach a whole new dimension.”