PESHAWAR: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif directed the authorities on Sunday to use helicopters to control a forest fire that has been raging in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province since Friday afternoon.
Wildfires have been reported in several parts of KP in the last couple of weeks, as blistering heatwaves continue to sweep Pakistan and the rest of South Asia.
Four members of a family, including three women, were killed in one such incident when their house was engulfed by a forest fire in Shangla district, said a senior Rescue 1122 official while speaking to Arab News on Saturday.
“PM Shehbaz Sharif has immediately ordered the deployment of two helicopters on the request of [National Disaster Management Authority] to help put out the fire in the Swat area,” his office announced in a Twitter post. “The full aerial support will boost the efforts of Rescue 1122, district administration & forest department to extinguish the fire.”
Taimur Ali, media officer at the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) told Arab News earlier that the fire had initially been put out by a team comprising officials from Rescue 1122 and the army along with the local community on Friday.
However, the flames were reignited by strong winds on Saturday morning.
The incident comes weeks after a forest fire that raged for 10 days in southwestern Pakistan’s Koh-i-Sulaiman mountains killed three people before the flames were controlled in a major firefighting operation involving an Iranian air tanker.
