Still hearth off season, no less than 24 deaths in South Korea | EUROtoday

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By our correspondent

NEW DELHI – Confirming the rising unpredictability of the threats introduced by local weather change, after California and Japan, the phenomenon of fires off the season has additionally affected South Korea, struggling for days with an emergency that has already burned greater than 17,500 hectares of land, created 27 thousand displaced individuals, made no less than 24 victims and destroyed a Buddhist temple with over 1,300 years of historical past.

The climatic issue

“We are mobilizing all the staff and equipment available to respond to the worst bonfires ever, but the situation remains difficult,” defined the interim president Han Duck-Soo in a message to the nation. “The damage – he continued – are enormous and rapidly increasing and there is a risk that we will have to deal with unprecedented costs. For this we must concentrate all our efforts and try to turn off the fires by the end of the week ».

A goal that speaks volumes about what is difficult to prove to be tamed of the flames in the presence of unusually dry soils for the spring season and very strong twenty that during the night between Tuesday and Wednesday they greatly extended the area invested by four different fires. For today there are rainfall in some of the areas at risk, but according to meteorologists they will be modest, between 5 and 10 millimeters.

The impact of the war in Ukraine

Among the victims of the fires there are primarily 60-70 yr olds, in addition to 4 firefighters who have been trapped by a hearth made uncontrollable by the robust wind and the pilot of a helicopter engaged within the shutdown of a stake. According to a watch witness, the plane would have began making an odd noise earlier than falling to the bottom and exploding. The fleet of 48 Russian helicopters equipped to the South Korean forestry service is proving insufficient to face the fires of the previous few days as a result of after the outbreak of the struggle in Ukraine it has turn into more and more troublesome to seek out spare elements. According to studies in October in Parliament, eight of those helicopters are now not in service since final yr and Wednesday’s accident has prompted the authorities to droop – even when briefly – the usage of all the opposite fleet plane. Overall, the variety of dedicated helicopters quantities to 130, whereas the whole of firefighters deployed within the 4 areas affected by the flames exceeds 10 thousand items.