Death toll from severe floods and mudslides that have devastated Turkey climbs to 44

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At least 40 people have now died following severe flooding and mudslides in coastal Turkey, the country’s emergency and disaster agency said Saturday – with hundreds more feared missing.

Torrential rains that pounded the Black Sea provinces of Bartin, Kastamonu and Sinop on Wednesday caused flooding that demolished homes, severed at least five bridges, swept away cars and rendered numerous roads unpassable. 

Turkish disaster agency AFAD said 34 people have now lost their lives in Kastamonu and while a further six have been killed in Sinop.

Meanwhile nine others remained hospitalised in Sinop and one person was missing in Bartin province, according to the agency. 

But residents on social media claimed there are hundreds more missing, a statement also made by opposition politician Hasan Baltacı, who told Halk TV that residents had contacted authorities seeking information about 329 people. 

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attended a funeral for the first victims on Friday and led a prayer with several hundred residents in Bozkurt, Kastamonu, one of the worst hit cities. 

He told the crowd: ‘We will do whatever we can as a state as quickly as we can, and rise from the ashes.

‘We can’t bring back the citizens we lost, but our state has the means and power to compensate those who lost loved ones.’ 

The leader vowed to reconstruct demolished homes, roads and bridges, adding: ‘Like many parts of the world, our country has been struggling with natural disasters for a while. 

‘It’s the same in America, Canada, Germany and other parts of Europe.’ 

About 2,250 people have been evacuated across the affected Turkish region, some lifted from rooftops by helicopters, and many were being temporarily housed in student dormitories, authorities said.

Climate scientists unequivocally say that climate change is leading to extreme weather events as the world warms because of the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Such calamities are expected to happen more frequently as the planet warms.

Experts in Turkey, however, say interference with rivers and improper construction have also contributed to the massive damage in Turkey’s floods.

Geologists have said that construction narrowed the river bed and the surrounding alluvial flood plain of the Ezine stream in Kastamonu’s Bozkurt district, where the damage was most severe, from 400 meters (1,312 feet) to 15 meters (49 feet). Residential buildings were built along the waterfront.

During severe rains, the contracted stream has limited area in which to move and can easily overflow. 

Videos posted by residents showed water rushing downstream in Bozkurt as the surrounding buildings and roads flooded.

One geologist, Ramazan Demirtas, explained the river bed narrowing on Twitter and said that humans were to blame for this week’s disaster.

The floods struck on the heels of wildfires in southern Turkey that devastated forestlands in the seaside provinces of Mugla and Antalya, which are popular with tourists. At least eight people died and thousands of residents were forced to flee.

It comes after search and rescue crews recovered 10 bodies Friday.  

Meanwhile, wildfires that have ravaged Greece for more than a week were brought under control on Friday, with the fire department saying there were no longer any ‘major active front, just scattered pockets’. 

It comes amid blistering temperatures this week which are expected to rise again on Friday as the ‘Lucifer’ heat dome continues to grip southern Europe.    

The devastation across Turkey’s northern Black Sea regions came just as the disaster-hit country was winning control over hundreds of wildfires that killed eight people and destroyed swathes of forest along its scenic southern coast. 

Turkey also suffered another bout of flooding in the northeastern province of Rize last month that killed six.     

Speaking in Bozkurt late on Thursday, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu described the scenes as ‘the most severe flood disaster I have seen.’  

‘The destruction is huge,’ Kerem Kinik, head of the Turkish Red Crescent, told NTV. ‘I hope that the missing are safe and that the number of deaths doesn’t increase.’

Bozkurt resident Yilmaz Ersevenli told NTV that he left his house to move his car to a safe area as the waters began to rise, but soon got swept away by the gushing floods. He managed to save himself by holding on to a tree that had also washed away.

‘I nearly lost my life trying to save my car,’ he said.

In Bartin province, at least 13 people were injured when a section of a bridge caved in.

In total, five bridges collapsed in the floods while two others were damaged, AFAD said. Dozens of villages are still without power and several roads remain blocked. 

World scientists believe that natural disasters like those in Turkey are becoming more intense and frequent because of global warming and climate change.

They also pose a serious challenge to Erdogan two years before Turkey’s next scheduled general election.

The powerful Turkish leader was roundly condemned on social media for tossing out bags of tea to locals while visiting one of the fire-ravaged regions when the wildfires were first spreading at the end of July.

Polls show that the climate is a top priority for up to seven million members of Generation Z whose votes Erdogan will need to extend his rule into a third decade in the 2023 vote. 

‘I offer my condolences to the loved ones of our 17 fellow citizens who lost their lives,’ he said when the toll was still 17 on Thursday night.

His office said that Erdogan was speaking on the phone to regional leaders and promising to deliver all the assistance available to the state. 

Emergency services said waters briefly rose in some parts as high as 13ft (4m) before subsiding and spreading across a region stretching more than 240km (150 miles) wide.

Agriculture and Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli warned on Wednesday that the area was facing ‘a disaster that we had not seen in 50 or 100 years’.

Rescuers have been forced to evacuate a hospital holding 45 patients – four of them in intensive care – in the region around the coastal city of Sinop.

Images on television and social media showed stranded villagers being plucked off rooftops by helicopter and bridges collapsing under the force of the rushing water below.

The Anadolu state news agency said Thursday that rescuers were focusing on a four-floor apartment building that partially crumbled and another one next to it that completely collapsed.

Images showed parts of both river-front buildings toppling into the rushing flood of brown water below.

Turkey’s disaster response authority said 25 people had lost their lives in the northern Kastamonu province and two in the neighbouring region of Sinop. One person was still missing.

Weather services predicted rains to continue to lash the affected area for the remainder of week. 

GREECE WILDFIRES UNDER CONTROL  

Fires burning for over a week that caused Greece’s worst ecological disaster in decades were finally brought under control on Friday.  

The fire department said there was no longer any ‘major active front, just scattered pockets’ of wildfires.   

Rain and falling temperatures helped the fire-dousing effort, but crews remain on alert for possible flare-ups in hard-to-access ravines on the island of Evia and in the region of Arcadia in the Peloponnese, a spokesman said.

But with high winds forecast for the weekend, the bulk of a huge multinational force that assisted Greek firefighters this week remains in place, civil protection spokesman Spyros Georgiou said.

‘They are helping to monitor the perimeters of burned areas in Evia and Arcadia, which are many kilometres (miles) long,’ he said.

‘Many of them are actually requesting to remain,’ Georgiou said. 

Mitsotakis on Friday appointed a new minister in charge of recovery from natural disasters in a bid to defuse growing anger over the struggle to curb wildfires that have charred thousands of hectares of forest. 

The new deputy minister, Christos Triantopoulos, will be responsible for aid and recovery from natural disasters, a new post created to compensate businesses and families hard hit by recent blazes. 

Hundreds of homes and many businesses have been destroyed in Evia, Arcadia and the outskirts of Athens in the prolonged fire wave that struck Greece from late July and intensified last week, during the worst heatwave in decades.

Greece is just one of a number of countries in the Mediterranean region that have been hit by a savage fire season.

Heatwaves have become more likely due to climate change, scientists say. As global temperatures rise over time, heatwaves are predicted to become more frequent and intense, and their impacts more widespread.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Thursday described the infernos as Greece’s ‘greatest ecological disaster in decades’.

He pledged hundreds of millions of euros in reconstruction, reforestation and flood prevention works.

‘[Recovery funds] will begin to be disbursed in a few days… and they will be greater than ever before, to all those affected,’ the prime minister told a news conference on Thursday.

The government has come under withering criticism from locals in stricken areas whose income from agricultural products and tourism has been wiped out.

There have been growing calls for the resignation of top public safety officials who as recently as June had insisted that the country was well-prepared.

Mitsotakis on Thursday said the country had battled some 600 blazes in a week, some of them ‘mega fires’.

But he admitted: ‘It seemed that this particular phenomenon exceeded our capabilities and the preparations put in place.’ 

In a sign of the potentially shifting front of Europe’s fires, three French Canadair aircraft that had been dispatched to Greece were redeployed to Sicily. 

HEAT WARNINGS FOR SPAIN, FRANCE, ITALY AND PORTUGAL 

Temperatures have soared over southern Europe this week and are forecast to peak again on Friday with highs of 104F (40C) expected in Italy. 

Meanwhile the Spanish weather office said that 15 of Spain’s 17 regions were on alert for high temperatures, with the mercury forecast to reach a high of 104F (40C) on Friday in much of the country. 

Authorities issued health alerts for Florence and Bologna for Friday and Saturday as wildfires charred the country’s south.   

Temperatures could hit 115F (46F) in the provinces of Seville, Cordoba and Jaen in the southwestern Andalusia region. 

Hot weather, also expected to push the mercury to 104F (40C) in Portugal, is expected to last until Monday.     

Meanwhile firefighters brought a wildfire in a forest in Spain’s northeastern region of Catalonia under control on  Friday as scorching temperatures put most of the country at risk for blazes.  

About 100 firefighters had worked overnight to tame the blaze in the Spanish province of Tarragona, which forced the evacuation on Thursday of about 30 campers and has destroyed about 75 hectares (185 acres) of protected forest, Catalonia’s firefighting service said in a tweet.

The fire was under control on Friday morning, but 11 water trucks, a helicopter and two water-dropping planes were still at the scene of the blaze, the service added.

Elsewhere in Spain, dozens of firefighters were battling a wildfire which broke out on Thursday evening near the town of Rubia, in the verdant northwestern region of Galicia.

This fire has so far destroyed about 200 hectares of land, the regional government of Galicia said in a tweet. 

Firefighters have been carrying out hundreds of operations through the Italian island of Sicily, as well as in the southern Calabria region. Meanwhile overnight, about 30 people were evacuated after a large fire broke out in a nature reserve near Tivoli, east of Rome 

ALGERIA ARRESTS 22 SUSPECTED ARSONISTS AFTER WILDFIRES KILL 69

Algeria has arrested 22 people suspected of being behind the most devastating wildfires in the country’s history that killed 65 people, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said on Thursday, calling the fires a ‘disaster’ and urging the preservation of national unity.

Dozens of forest fires have hit mountainous areas in northern Algeria since Monday, mainly in Tizi Ouzou, the main province of the Kabylie region east of the capital, Algiers.

‘Some fires have been caused by high temperatures but criminal hands were behind most of them,’ Tebboune said in a live speech on state television.

‘We have arrested 22 suspects, including 11 in Tizi Ouzou. Justice will perform its duty.’

At least 28 military men were among the dead as the North African country deployed the army to help firefighters contain fires that ravaged several houses in forested areas.

‘It’s a disaster … disaster. But our strength will not collapse,’ Tebboune said, praising aid caravans from other provinces to provide affected regions with food, medicine and donations of other material.

‘We must preserve national unity… I insist on national unity,’ he added.

In addition to soldiers on the ground, the army has been using six helicopters to extinguish blazes. The are supported by two firefighting planes hired from the European Union and which have been in action since early Thursday.

The government will receive two more planes from Spain on Friday and a third one from Switzerland in the next three days, Tebboune said.

Tebboune has declared three days of national mourning starting on Thursday after the death toll climbed to at least 69, including 28 soldiers deployed to help overstretched emergency services.

UN REPORT: MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING MUST BE REVERSED

The UN report, which as been dubbed a ‘code red for humanity’, said the Earth is likely to warm by 1.5C within the next 20 years — a decade earlier than previously expected — and heatwaves, flooding and droughts will become more frequent and intense.

Scientists had expected temperatures to rise by 1.5C above pre-industrial levels between 2030 and 2052 but now believe it will happen between this year and 2040. 

‘It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,’ said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. ‘I don’t see any area that is safe… Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.’ 

The report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was produced by 200 scientists from 60 countries.

Drawing on more than 14,000 scientific papers, the review included the latest knowledge on past and potential future warming, how humans are changing the climate and how that is increasing extreme weather events and driving sea-level rises.

The authors said it was ‘virtually certain’ that heatwaves ‘have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions’.

They also said a rise in sea levels approaching two metres by the end of this century ‘cannot be ruled out’, while the Arctic is likely to be ‘practically sea ice-free’ in September at least once before 2050.  

However, some experts say there is still hope that cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases could stabilise rising temperatures.

Scientists involved in the report said the 1.5C or 2C thresholds are not cliff edges the world will fall off, but that every bit of warming makes a difference, so it is important to curb temperature rises as much as possible.

Professor Richard Betts, from the Met Office Hadley Centre and a contributing author to the report, said: ‘Like the speed limit on a motorway, staying below it is not perfectly safe and exceeding it does not immediately lead to calamity, but the risks do increase if the limit is passed.

‘Limiting warming to 1.5C clearly needs much more urgent emissions cuts than is currently happening, but if the target is still breached we should not assume all is lost and give up – it will still be worth continuing action on emissions reductions to avoid even more warming.’ 

The report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was produced by 200 scientists from 60 countries.

Drawing on more than 14,000 scientific papers, the review included the latest knowledge on past and potential future warming, how humans are changing the climate and how that is increasing extreme weather events and driving sea-level rises.

The authors said it was ‘virtually certain’ that heatwaves ‘have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions’.

They also said a rise in sea levels approaching two metres by the end of this century ‘cannot be ruled out’, while the Arctic is likely to be ‘practically sea ice-free’ in September at least once before 2050. 

Following the report, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called it ‘sobering reading’ and said it was clear the next decade was going to be pivotal to securing the future of the planet.

‘We know what must be done to limit global warming – consign coal to history and shift to clean energy sources, protect nature and provide climate finance for countries on the frontline,’ he added. 

And US President Joe Biden urged the country and world nations to swiftly limit greenhouses gasses.

He said in a statement: ‘We can’t wait to tackle the climate crisis. The signs are unmistakable. The science is undeniable. And the cost of inaction keeps mounting.’ 

Meanwhile UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the new report a ‘code red for humanity’.

He warned: ‘The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.’

And Anthony Blinken, US Secretary of State, said in a statement: ‘Today, the United States joined nearly 200 IPCC member governments in approving the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report.

‘The report finds we are already edging closer to a 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7F] warmer world, and every day emissions rise the prospects for averting the worst impacts of climate change become dimmer. 

‘This is why it is essential that all countries – in particular the major economies – do their part during this critical decade of the 2020s to put the world on a trajectory to keep a 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7F] limit on warming within reach.

‘This is why the United States has committed to a 50-52 percent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels in 2030 and is marshaling the entire federal government to tackle the climate crisis. We cannot delay ambitious climate action any longer.’