Wildfires scorch S.Korea's east coast

Seoul, March 8 Multiple wildfires have scorched mountain areas in South Korea's eastern coast over the past five days and firefighting efforts have made slow headway hampered by thick smoke and winds, officials said on Tuesday.

Firefighting officials said they were bracing for a long-term battle as numerous wildfires are simultaneously scattered over an extensive area and the wind direction changed unfavourably, reports Yonhap News Agency.

They had initially aimed to extinguish the main fires on Monday but were disturbed by thick smoke, sea fog and other unfavourable weather conditions.

The wildfires spurred by high winds amid dry conditions have burned an estimated 21,772 hectares of woodland, the size of 30,493 soccer fields, along the east coastal areas as of 6 a.m. on Tuesday, according to the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters.

In terms of damaged areas, the ongoing blaze is close to the nation's largest wildfires on record, which burned 23,794 hectares of east coast mountains in 2000.

Uljin, a North Gyeongsang county 330 km southeast of Seoul, was hardest hit with 16,913 hectares burned, followed by three Gangwon Province cities of Donghae (2,100 hectares), Gangneung (1,900 hectares) and Samcheok (772 hectares), the agency said.

As of Monday night, no casualties had been reported, but 570 facilities and homes had been damaged and 338 people in 220 households had been displaced, it added.

The fire extinguishing rates reached 50 per cent in the Uljin and Samcheok areas, and 90 per cent in the Gangneung and Donghae areas, the agency said, noting about 3,000 firefighting personnel and about 100 helicopters were mobilized during the day.

The blaze began on march 4 morning in Uljin and rapidly spread north to Samcheok in the afternoon, driven by strong winds whose speed reached nearly 30 metres per second.

Police and the KFS are speeding up their investigations into the exact cause of the wildfires in Uljin without ruling out the possibility of the fires being started by cigarette butts from motorists.

The government has designated Uljin, Samcheok, Gangneung and Donghae, ravaged by the massive wildfires, as a special disaster zone and vowed swift support for the victims.

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