BEIRUT — The Environment Ministry warned Friday of a heightened fire danger, particularly over the weekend, as the fire index maps issued by the Fire Laboratory at the University of Balamand indicate “a severe risk of fire outbreaks that are difficult to control and a high possibility of their sudden and rapid expansion,” the state-run National News Agency reported.
Here’s what we know:
• According to the NNA, the Environment Ministry said in a statement that "the areas exposed to the danger of fires are distributed over all Lebanese territories, especially in the northern and southern regions and the Bekaa.”
• The ministry urged citizens and concerned authorities to be cautious and to refrain from using fire sources near vegetation covers, such as burning dry weeds and fireworks.
• Many regions in Lebanon are wildfire-prone, affected by the summer’s high temperatures and dry conditions. Fires have ravaged villages and ecosystems in their path in previous years. Last year in July, raging wildfires burned large swathes of Lebanon's pine forests in the mountainous north, killing at least one firefighter and forcing some residents to flee. The fire-damaged areas have since been plagued by illegal tree cutting.
• A fire burned green spaces on Thursday in a plantation area that belongs to the Agriculture Ministry in the region of Abdeh, in Akkar, northern Lebanon. Civil Defense teams have been responding to extinguish fires, but suffer from a chronic lack of equipment as the country struggles from an economic collapse.
• Caretaker Environment Minister Nasser Yassin had said that many of Lebanon’s wildfires are of “human origin.”