Fires in Lebanon
Fires and Smoke over Lebanon
2 October 2007
DEIR AL-QAMAR, Lebanon (Reuters) – Forest fires blazed in several areas ofLebanon on Tuesday, including around the ancient town of Deir al-Qamar, a worldheritage site.
“Most of Deir al-Qamar is engulfed in thick, black smoke. There’s notone wooded area left. Some villas are ablaze, cars are burnt, the phone andelectricity lines are burnt,” resident Joseph al-Itr told Reuters bytelephone.
About 85 fires started on Tuesday and 118 on Monday, the head of the LebaneseCivil Defence, Brigadier General Darweesh Hobeika, told Reuters. A civil defencesource estimated the fires had destroyed around 100 hectares of woodland.
“It’s a 95 percent possibility that the fires were caused intentionallyby people trying to obtain charcoal as a cheaper substitute for fuel,”Hobeika said.
The source said 60-70 percent of the fires had been contained but some stillraged in Rashayya in the eastern Bekaa Valley and Barouk in the southeasternShouf region.
The blazes were worst in the area around Deir al-Qamar, a well-preservedChristian town in the Shouf that is a UNESCO world heritage site.
Television footage showed several burned-out cars on roads in the Shoufregion and smoke billowing from thick forests.
The town’s deputy governor described the fires as an environmental disaster.
Big fires were also reported in the northern region of Akkar and several inthe Metn area northeast of Beirut.
Local media said some residents had been evacuated from their homes. Ninepeople trying to fight fires in the north had suffered from smoke inhalation,hospital sources said.
The Lebanese Committee for the Prevention of Fires urged authorities todeclare a state of emergency. “Lebanon is on the brink of desertificationand the woodlands no longer exceed 10 percent (of its area),” it said inthe statement.
Lebanon’s interior minister requested fire-fighting planes from Italy, theNational News Agency reported.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASAs Aqua satellite passed overhead on 25 September 2007, and captured this image. The most intense fire activity was in Bolivia, where fires are concentrated in the Santa Cruz Department, in the southeastern part of the country.
Terra
2 October 2007
Click on scene for 250m resolution.
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