Hundreds flee as fires edge closer to Turkish power plant

More than 180 bushfires have scorched huge swaths of forest and killed eight people in Turkey.

The fire reaches the perimeter of the Kemerkoy Thermal Power Plant on Thursday. Picture: Getty Images

Turkish rescuers on Thursday began evacuating hundreds of villagers by sea after a deadly bushfire engulfed the outer edges of a thermal power plant storing thousands of tonnes of coal.

Firefighters and police fled the 35-year-old Kemerkoy plant in the Aegean province of Mugla as balls of orange flame tore through the surrounding hills.

Hundreds of villagers – many clutching small bags of belongings grabbed from their abandoned houses as the evacuation call sounded – began piling onto coastguard speedboats at the port of Oren.

The regional authority said “all explosive chemicals” and other hazardous material had been ­removed from the site.

“But there’s a risk that the fire could spread to the thousands of tonnes of coal inside,” regional mayor Osman Gurun said. Officials said hydrogen tanks used to cool the station had been emptied and filled with water as a precaution. Turkish news reports said most of the coal had been moved from the plant to a storage site 5km away as a precaution when the blaze first approached the ­region at the start of the week.

More than 180 bushfires have scorched huge swaths of forest and killed eight people since breaking out along almost the entire perimeter of Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts.

The EU’s satellite monitoring service said their “radiative power” – a measure of the fires’ ­intensity – “has reached unprecedented values in the entire dataset, which goes back to 2003”.

The fires’ strength and scale have exposed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to days of criticism for what some observers say has been his sluggish response to the crisis. Mr Erdogan had just begun a live television interview about the fires as news broke about the evacuation of the plant.

He acknowledged that the ­efforts of firefighters to save the station were failing in the face of “tremendous wind” fanning the flames. But he also lashed out at opposition leaders for trying to score political points by questioning his government’s readiness and response.

“When fires break out in America or Russia, (the opposition) stands by the government,” he said. “Like elsewhere in the world, there has been a big increase in the forest fires in our country. There should be no room for politics here.”

The Turkish government ­appears to have been caught off guard by the scale and ferocity of the flames. Its media watchdog on Tuesday warned broadcasters that they might be fined if they continued showing live footage of the blazes or air images of screaming people running for their lives.

AFP