ALGIERS (GNP): A fire at an orphanage in a suburb of the Algerian capital has killed at least 11 people and injured 19, the country’s civil defense said Thursday, as authorities in the North African nation continue to battle a wider wave of blazes fuelled by an ongoing heatwave.
The civil defense said its units were continuing efforts to extinguish the fire, which broke out in the Mohammadia district of Algiers. The cause of the blaze has not yet been determined. Officials described the death toll as provisional, standing at 11, and did not specify the ages of the victims.
National television footage showed Prime Minister Sifi Ghrieb visiting the injured in hospital, underscoring the scale of concern the incident has drawn from the highest levels of government.
The orphanage fire has struck at a moment when Algeria has been sweltering under a heatwave that has persisted for several days. In that period alone, nearly 1,000 fires have been recorded across the country, a figure that illustrates the scale of the challenge facing the country’s emergency response infrastructure this summer.
Separately, wildfires fuelled by the same heatwave have been ravaging parts of northern Algeria for days and have already claimed the life of a municipal worker who was taking part in firefighting operations, according to media reports.
Local media quoted the mayor of Beni Mouhli, in Algeria’s Setif province, as saying the worker, aged 59, died while assisting emergency crews in containing the fires. The civil defense has not yet confirmed this specific death, though it said on Tuesday night that one person with severe burns had been evacuated by helicopter, without identifying the individual involved.
Authorities have not disclosed the total extent of land burned in the wildfires so far. In a statement issued Wednesday morning, the Algerian civil defense said its units had responded to nearly 140 separate fires across the country within the preceding 24 hours, and that most of these had since been brought under control.
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Algeria is not alone in facing this pressure. Other countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea, including France and Italy, have also been contending with wildfires in recent days, pointing to a broader regional pattern this summer.
Wildfires are a recurring feature of the Algerian summer, but scientists say the frequency and intensity of such fires are increasingly being exacerbated by drought conditions and heatwaves linked to climate change, a trend that continues to test the country’s civil defense capacity year after year.
