Wildfires in South Korea are now the largest and deadliest on record, having burned more forest and killed more people than any previous blaze, officials said on Thursday, as the death toll hit 27.<\/p>\n
More than a dozen fires broke out over the weekend, scorching wide swathes of the southeast and forcing around 37,000 people to flee, with the fire cutting off roads and downing communications lines as residents escaped in panic.<\/p>\n
South Korea\u2019s Ministry of Interior and Safety said that 27 people had been killed and dozens more injured, with the toll likely to rise. It is the highest number of deaths since the Korea Forest Service started records for wildfires in 1987.<\/p>\n
More than 35,000 hectares (86,500 acres) of forest have been burned, Lee Han-kyung, disaster and safety division chief said, adding that the fire was still spreading \u201crapidly\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know how to describe it. My heart feels like it\u2019s going to burst even now speaking about it,\u201d said Kim Mi-ja, an 84-year-old Andong resident whose home was burnt down.<\/p>\n
The extent of damage makes it South Korea\u2019s largest-ever wildfire, after an inferno in April 2000 that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast.<\/p>\n
Authorities said changing wind patterns and dry weather had revealed the limitations of conventional firefighting methods.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t have the strength to put the fire out,\u201d said resident Lee Sung-gu. \u201cI didn\u2019t have the courage to do it, I could only just watch,\u201d the 79-year-old told AFP, describing how all houses in the area were destroyed.<\/p>\n
Many of those killed were residents \u2014 in particular the elderly.<\/p>\n
At least three firefighters were killed, and a pilot in a firefighting helicopter died when his aircraft crashed in a mountain area, officials said.<\/p>\n
\u2018Climate crisis\u2019
\nLast year was South Korea\u2019s hottest year on record, although temperatures in the months running up to the blaze had been colder than last year, and in line with the country\u2019s 30-year average, Korea Meteorological Administration data shows.<\/p>\n
But the fire-hit region had been experiencing unusually dry weather with below-average precipitation, authorities said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis wildfire has once again exposed the harsh reality of a climate crisis unlike anything we\u2019ve experienced before,\u201d disaster chief Lee said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe affected areas have seen only half the average rainfall, coupled with unusually strong winds, which have drastically accelerated the spread of the fire and intensified the damage,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Some types of extreme weather have a well-established link with climate change, such as heat waves or heavy rainfall.<\/p>\n
Other phenomena, such as forest fires, droughts, snowstorms and tropical storms can result from a combination of complex factors.<\/p>\n
Yeh Sang-Wook, professor of climatology at Seoul\u2019s Hanyang University, told AFP that the lack of rainfall had dried out the land \u201ccreating favourable conditions for wildfires\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t say that it\u2019s only due to climate change, but climate change is directly [and] indirectly affecting the changes we are experiencing now. This is a sheer fact.\u201d<\/p>\n
But another expert, Professor Hong Suk-hwan at Pusan National University\u2019s Department of Landscape Architecture, said the country\u2019s forest management practices also took some blame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wildfires in South Korea are now the largest and deadliest on record, having burned more forest and killed more people than any previous blaze, officials said on Thursday, as the death toll hit 27. More than a dozen fires broke out over the weekend, scorching wide swathes of the southeast and forcing around 37,000 people […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7458,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7459,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7457\/revisions\/7459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}