Cuba’s 2012 Forest Fires Mostly Man-made
Cuba’s 2012 Forest Fires Mostly Man-made
13 March 2013
published by www.bernama.com
Cuba — Cuba registered 421 forest fires last year with nearly 90 percent sparked by human negligence, Xinhua news agency quoted local media as saying.
The country’s Ranger Corps said in 2012, fires ravaged over 3,468 hectares of land and that reckless actions of hunters, smokers and operators of agricultural machinery or other equipment without spark safeguards were the main forms of human negligence.
More than 70 percent of the fires did not spread over five hectares, indicating that the rangers had become more efficient in containing fires, said the corps chief Raul Gonzalez Rodriguez.
Most of these fires occurred in the provinces of Pinar del Rio, Matanzas, Villa Clara, Camaguey and Holguin and the special municipality of Isle of Youth.
