Firefighters master deadly blaze
2008-08-05 13:59
Ankara - Turkish firefighters have mastered a major fire that claimed two lives after six days of battling the blaze, a senior official told Anatolia news agency, comparing its devastation to "an atomic bomb".
The fire ravaged large woodlands near Turkey's main tourist hub on the Mediterranean.
"The fire is completely brought under control," the deputy head of the forestry department in Antalya province, Mustafa Kurtulmuslu, told the agency.
Firefighters were on Tuesday extinguishing the remaining flames, he said, likening the damage of the blaze to the explosion of "an atomic bomb".
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was to visit the province on Tuesday.
Antalya, Turkey's primary tourist destination, is dotted with luxury resorts and prominent historical sites that attract about seven million foreign holiday-makers every year.
The blaze, which ravaged about 4 000 hectares of woodlands between the towns of Serik and Manavgat, began on Thursday. Within a day it was out of control, fanned by winds reaching up to 70km/h.
Officials think it was probably started by power lines that had been torn down by the wind.
The blaze left several dozen people homeless and killed two men in the village of Karatas, where about 60 houses were burnt down.
Several other villages were evacuated.
There was no damage to tourist resorts on the coastline.
On Saturday, the blaze reached woods near Olympos, a picturesque beach popular with young people, and helicopters were still pouring water on flames in highland areas inaccessible by land on Tuesday, officials said.
Forest fires are common in Turkey as well as other Mediterranean countries during the hot and arid summer months, sparked mostly by negligent residents.
In 2006, a radical Kurdish separatist group claimed responsibility for a series of fires in southern and western Turkey.
- AFP