SEOUL (AFP) – Air raid sirens wailed across central Seoul yesterday as officials stopped cars and ordered people to head to underground shelters in South Korea’s first civil defence exercise in six years.

The 20-minute drill, which began at 2pm, was aimed at “preparing for a quick evacuation in the event of an air raid attack such as North Korea’s missile provocations”, Seoul’s Interior Ministry said.

As sirens went off across South Korea, pedestrians were instructed to move to nearby shelters or underground facilities. There are around 17,000 designated shelters across the country. In regions closer to nuclear-armed North Korea, the government prepared a more intense drill, with chemical, biological and radiological training, including instructions for putting on a gas mask and using emergency food rations.

Participation in the drill was not mandatory, but those who took part said the training was important for raising awareness about the security situation on the Korean peninsula.

“If North Korean soldiers suddenly invade, confusion will lead to more casualties,” said barista Ahn Tae-hong, adding, “That is why we must train well.”

Choi In-ho, a 62-year-old travel agent, said the drill was “a bit inconvenient”, but necessary.

“We are always in confrontation with North Korea, but we’ve become too complacent about it,” he told AFP.

But for others, it was business as usual.

The civil defence exercises were launched in 1969 following a raid by North Korean commandos into the presidential compound in Seoul, but they have been suspended since 2017 – initially due to a thaw in relations with Pyongyang, and then because of the COVID-19 pandemic. South Korea’s widely read Chosun Ilbo newspaper said the resumption of the civil drills was “urgent” in the wake of various natural disasters and the growing nuclear threats from the North.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA (AP) – Canadian firefighters have begun easing evacuation orders in a scenic region of British Columbia, with the prospect of better weather raising hopes for the battle to contain wildfires, authorities said on Tuesday.

To the north, in Northwest Territories, a weekend of cooler temperatures, favourable winds and some rain allowed fire teams outside the provincial capital of Yellowknife to shift their efforts to quelling the blaze after spending days just keeping it from advancing on the city.

Those are just two of the 386 wildfires that authorities said are currently burning in Canada, which has seen a record number of wildfires this year.

The fires have chased tens of thousands of people from their homes and also sent smoke into parts of the United States (US).

Officials in southern British Columbia were optimistic about the battle against wildfires that raged for days in the Okanagan Valley in threatening towns in the Kelowna area, a summer destination about 90 miles north of the US border.

“I have to say that I really am beginning to feel that we are turning the corner here on this fire and a major measure of that is the rescinding of some evacuation orders,” West Kelowna Fire Chief Jason Brolund said. “I feel like we might be turning the corner a bit on the weather
as well.”

Brolund estimated the fire destroyed fewer than 70 structures in West Kelowna and fewer than 20 on Westbank First Nation lands. To date there have been no reports of loss of life or missing people.

He said the mountains have been shrouded with smoke since the fire advanced last week, and the landscape is going to look different when the skies clear. “It might be pretty dramatic to start to see what we’ve lost out there,” he said.

A total of about 27,000 people in British Columbia have been under evacuation orders, with 35,000 more under alert to be ready to evacuate on short notice.

In the Okanagan Valley, evacuation orders were lifted in parts of Smith Creek, Tallus Ridge and Rose Valley. Bowinn Ma, British Columbia’s minister of emergency management and climate readiness, said evacuation orders had been downgraded to alerts in parts of West Kelowna, Westbank First Nation and Lake Country.

“We’re certainly not out of the woods, but I’m really heartened by what I saw on the ground,” British Columbia Premier David Eby said. He was speaking in West Kelowna after taking a helicopter tour.

He said it will be a long time for families who lost homes to recover. “This is such an awful time for people,” Eby said.

British Columbia’s minister of emergency management said an order restricting travel to many communities in the province’s southern interior due to wildfires will be lifted at midnight.

Bowinn Ma said non-essential travel to West Kelowna continues to be prohibited and people are being urged to stay away from the Lake Country and Shuswap areas.

In Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Mayor Rebecca Alty said the fire remains a threat to the community, but that fire officials are working to “evaluate the amount of work it will take to bring the fire to a mop up (stage) and eliminate the threat to the capital.”

Alty said this process may take a few days.

Territory Minister Caroline Wawzonek said the government is working on plans to help people who have been evacuated and making plans for their return. “We’re now n a position to start to do that hard work,” she said.

Flames have been kept about 15 kilometres from Yellowknife, which was left virtually empty after nearly all 20,000 residents fled for safety last week.

Jennifer Young, information officer for the province’s emergency Management Organization, said at a Monday evening news conference that wildfires had caused a total of 25,900 people to leave their homes in the territory, about 60 per cent of its population.

With Yellowknife a near ghost town, officials have warned city employees, first responders and volunteers who remained behind to be aware of wildlife displaced by the wildfires. In a message posted on Sunday on Facebook, officials said bears and other animals had been reported roaming in the city.

The BC Wildfire Service said 100 firefighters from Mexico were expected to arrive in the province Tuesday and 200 from South Africa by the end of the week

In Northwest Territories, there have been efforts to transport evacuees’ pets to safety.

On an emergency flight on Monday, the California-based non-profit group Wings of Rescue flew out 17 dogs, cats and other animals.

SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC (AP) – Tropical Storm Franklin made landfall yesterday on the island of Hispaniola shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, bringing fears it would trigger deadly landslides and heavy flooding in both countries.

Franklin was expected to swirl above the island for most of the day, with forecasters warning the storm could dump up to 10 inches of rain, with a maximum of 15 inches for the central region of Hispaniola.

Yesterday morning, the storm was centered about 105 miles west-southwest of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, according to the National Hurricane Centre in Miami.

It had maximum winds of 50 miles per hour (mph) with higher gusts and was moving northward at 10mph.

It made landfall along the country’s southern coast near Bahahona.

Emergency operations officials said they were looking for a 54-year-old man with mental health problems who went missing after he jumped into a creek late on Tuesday.

In the Caribbean, officials were most concerned about Franklin’s impact in Haiti, which is vulnerable to catastrophic flooding given the country’s severe erosion.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry had urged Haitians on Tuesday to stock up on water, food and medication as authorities checked on some of the more than 200,000 people displaced by gang violence, with some living on the street or in makeshift shelters.

In the Dominican Republic, officials shuttered schools, government agencies and several airports with at least 24 of the country’s 31 provinces under red alert.

By early yesterday, more than 40 aqueducts were out of service because of heavy rains, affecting more than 830,000 customers.

Franklin is the seventh named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. On August 10, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration updated its forecast and warned that this year’s hurricane season would be above normal.

LAHAINA, HAWAII (AP) – Authorities in Hawaii pleaded with relatives of those missing after the deadliest United States (US) wildfire in more than a century to come forward and give DNA samples, saying the low number provided so far threatens to hinder efforts to identify any remains discovered in the ashes.

Some 1,000 to 1,100 names remain on the FBI’s tentative, unconfirmed list of people unaccounted for after wildfires destroyed the historic seaside community of Lahaina on Maui.

But the family assistance center so far has collected DNA from just 104 families, said Julie French, who is helping lead efforts to identify remains by DNA analysis.

Maui Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Martin, who is running the center, said that the number of family members coming in to provide DNA samples is “a lot lower” than in other major disasters around the country, though it wasn’t immediately clear why.

“That’s our concern, that’s why I’m here today, that’s why I’m asking for this help,” he said.

Martin and French sought to reassure people that any samples would be used only to help identify fire victims and would not be entered into any law enforcement databases or used for any other purpose.

People will not be not asked about their immigration status or citizenship, they said.

“What we want to do – all we want to do – is help people locate and identify their unaccounted-for loved ones,” Martin said.

Two weeks after the flames tore through Lahaina, officials are facing huge challenges to determine how many people who remain unaccounted for perished and how many made it to safety but haven’t checked in.

Something similar happened after a wildfire in 2018 that killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise, California.

Authorities in Butte County, home to Paradise, ultimately published a list of the missing in the local newspaper, a decision that helped identify scores of people who had made it out alive but were listed as missing.

Within a month, the list dropped from 1,300 names to only a dozen.

Hawaii officials have expressed concern that by releasing a list of the missing, they would also be identifying some people who have died. In an email on Tuesday, the State Joint Information Centre called it “a standard held by all law enforcement and first responders here in Hawaii, out of compassion and courtesy for the families, to withhold the names until the families can be contacted”.

AP – Water-dropping planes from several European countries joined hundreds of firefighters yesterday battling wildfires raging for days across Greece that left 20 people dead, while major blazes also burned in Spain’s Tenerife and in northwestern Turkiye near the Greek border.

Greece’s largest active forest fire was burning out of control for the fifth day near the city of Alexandroupolis in the country’s northeast, while authorities were trying to prevent a blaze on the northwestern fringe of Athens from scorching homes and reaching the Parnitha national park, one of the last green areas near the Greek capital.

Over the last three days, 209 wildfires have broken out across Greece, fire department spokesman, Ioannis Artopios, said yesterday morning. The blazes, fanned by gale-force winds and hot, dry summer conditions, have led authorities to order the evacuations of dozens of villages and the main hospital in Alexandroupolis.

Although gale-force winds were gradually abating in many parts of the country, the risk of new fires remained high.

“Conditions remain difficult and in many extreme cases ,” Artopios said. Firefighters searching recently burnt areas in the Alexandroupolis region discovered the bodies of 18 people believed to be migrants in a forest on Tuesday.

Another two people were found dead on Monday, one in northern Greece and another in a separate fire in central Greece.

With firefighting forces stretched to the limit, Greece called for assistance from other European countries. Germany, Sweden, Croatia and Cyprus sent water-dropping aircraft, while Romania and the Czech Republic sent dozens of firefighters and water tanks.

Evacuations were ordered for several areas on the northwestern fringe of the Greek capital as a wildfire that started on Tuesday raced up a mountain towards the Parnitha national park, threatened a military base in the area and reached homes in the foothills.

More than 200 firefighters backed by volunteers, military and police forces, eight helicopters and seven planes, including two from Germany and two from Sweden, were battling the blaze.

The fire in Alexandroupolis, a region near Greece’s eastern border with Turkiye, continued to burn out of control, with dozens of Romanian firefighters joining the battle against the flames, backed by eight helicopters and five planes, including two from Cyprus.

Across the border in Turkiye’s Canakkale province, strong winds were fanning a wildfire burning for a second day.

Authorities evacuated an elderly care home and more than 1,250 people from nine villages and closed down a highway as a precaution. More than 80 people were treated in hospitals for the effects of smoke.

Ibrahim Yumakli, Turkiye’s forestry minister, said firefighting teams backed by more than two dozen fire-dousing planes and helicopters had largely blocked the blaze from spreading beyond the 15 square kilometres (km2) it has affected so far.

Authorities also suspended maritime traffic through the narrow Dardanelles Strait linking the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara, which the water-dropping aircraft were using to refill, the minister said.

Sporadic fires were also being reported in Italy, which has been engulfed in a heatwave expected to extend into the weekend with temperatures above 38 degrees Celsius in many cities. Forty firefighters and three aircraft were battling a brush fire that broke out early yesterday on the outskirts of the Ligurian seaside town of Sanremo, a popular summer destination. No injuries or property damage were reported.

With their hot, dry summers, southern European countries are particularly prone to wildfires.

European Union officials have blamed climate change for the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires in Europe, noting that 2022 was the second-worst year for wildfire damage on record after 2017.

BUDAPEST (AFP) – Hungary has released more than 1,400 convicted people smugglers from prisons, authorities said yesterday, a move which the European Commission is challenging.

Last month, the European Commission launched a legal procedure against Hungary after Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government in April decided to release jailed people smugglers and gave them three days to leave the country.

Hungary said at the time that its overcrowded jails were holding 2,600 people from 73 countries – 13 per cent of the prison population – at great cost to the taxpayer.

“We have released 1,468 detainees of foreign nationality who have been convicted of smuggling of human beings,” the National Command of Penitentiary Services told AFP in an email.

“Hungary had to take this decision on people smugglers because Brussels does not contribute to the cost of border protection, but punishes Hungary when prisons are overcrowded,” Deputy Interior Minister Bence Retvari has said.

The European Union Executive said that no systems have been put in place to monitor whether the people smugglers serve the rest of their sentences in their homelands.

Austria in particular has been angered by its neighbour’s decision and has tightened controls on its border.