Under-equipped and overworked: Turkey’s firefighters face another daunting fire season
ADANA — Devastating news arrived late on Wednesday, July 23. Ten firefighters had perished while combating towering flames in a forest in Eskişehir.
For over a month, wildfires had scorched tens of thousands of hectares of land across Turkey. In June alone, over 612 wildfires were reported, according to official statistics. Throughout July, wildfires intensified across the country, a rolling crisis that peaked with the Eskişehir tragedy.
“Pour water all over me,” a middle-aged firefighter pleaded in a video that circulated online. “Save me. I’m burning,” he told colleagues as a blaze rose behind him in Eskişehir.
Twenty-four people, including 19 forestry workers and five Search and Rescue Association (AKUT) members, were caught in the fire when the wind suddenly changed direction and turned the flames toward them, Agriculture and Forestry Min. İbrahim Yumaklı said in a statement.
Encircled by flames, the firefighters saw their deaths as inevitable and began exchanging their final goodbyes. Soon after, news reports revealed some of them were new hires. One of the survivors had joined the force two months earlier. While one of the workers who died, Tolunay Kocaman, had been employed for only one month.
Along with fatal incidents in Izmir and Bursa, wildfires have caused at least 16 deaths in Turkey so far this year. The losses once again put a spotlight on the lack of fire preparedness in Turkey – both in staffing and aircrafts – despite the growing frequency of wildfires in the Mediterranean region.
While most citizens reacted to the firefighter deaths by expressing sadness and grief, many on social media asked: How could this be? How could the government allow this? How many more wildfires do we need to learn from our mistakes?
A set of problems
According to Doğan Kantarcı, a retired forestry professor at Istanbul University, the Turkish firefighting force currently has a number of systemic shortcomings. This includes a lack of sufficient training for newcomers, who appear to begin their work too close to the start of fire season.
Kantarcı has taught thousands of forestry workers, and says he’s never been so gloomy about the state of the force. The number one problem, he said, is the inadequate amount of on-the-ground personnel.
“They need to be able to go in three rounds,” he said, referring to work shifts. He added members of the force were “once, one of the best in the world,” but are now overworked and lacking in numbers.
Seconding this concern, one forestry worker who requested anonymity told Turkey recap that he didn’t sleep for the first two days of the wildfires in Hatay last month, when at least 500 hectares of forests were burned and three villages were evacuated in the process.
According to the professor, firefighters exposed to smoke or toxic gas should be rotated every three to four hours.
“There is no such thing as rounds,” the worker said between coughs. Once a fire expands, it is up to the squad on the ground to extinguish it without back-up support, he added.
Yet, it is not only personnel or moments to rest or eat that are lacking, according to the worker, it is also personal protective equipment and gear.
“We’re nearing the end of the season, and we haven’t received new uniforms or headlights,” he said. “I haven’t even seen an oxygen mask this season.”
Meanwhile, firefighters also worry about their compensation amid high inflation in Turkey. According to local media reports, a text message found on the phone of one of the deceased firefighters asked: “Will we be able to get our salary this month with a raise?”
“Of course, they had this on their minds when they went to that fire,” the worker said of his late colleagues, who passed away in Eskişehir. “I’m not saying that’s what caused their deaths, but it was certainly on their minds.”
Numbers in the air
“A wildfire is a war, and it’s a war against hell,” Prof. Kantarcı said, adding that combating fires in Turkey is made more difficult by the lack of firefighting aircrafts in the Turkish Aeronautical Association (THK), the nation’s civil aviation agency.
Turkey rents aircrafts from Russia instead of using its own fleet to battle summer wildfires, “so that some people can profit off of the deals,” Kantarcı argued.
But the model remains insufficient, he said. Flying a plane as close and swiftly as one can to the flames “is a patriotic duty,” which also calls for deep knowledge of and emotional ties to the geography, Kantarcı suggested: “Someone from here should be doing the job.”
In the summer of 2021, during the catastrophic Muğla-Antalya fires that burned for weeks, the government was heavily criticized for failing to deploy the aerial firefighting fleet in time. The ministry, then too, had turned to rented Russian planes, one of which crashed in the southeast, killing eight people.
Villagers and volunteers had resorted to carrying plastic buckets of water and throwing soil on the fire with shovels. The images then, like now, showed people trying to put out the flames with bottled water as shocked villagers held their heads between their palms.
The professor said less forest area would have been burned last month if the THK’s Canadian, double-engine Scooper CL-215 planes – with a near-five tons of water capacity – were deployed as in 2021.
The Presidential Budget and Strategy Directorate’s most recent report covering 2024 stated: “During the fire season, a total of 105 firefighting helicopters, 27 planes, 14 unmanned aerial vehicles, one command plane, and six command helicopters were deployed.”
Assets registered in the General Directorate’s 2024 inventory included: nine helicopters, 10 planes, and 10 unmanned aerial vehicles. However, THK, which is overseen by a trustee appointed in 2019, put eight amphibious CL-215 planes up for sale in May.
The set of shortcomings point to the broader issues caused by funding reallocation and the weakening of critical institutions under the current government, according to the professor.
“They can spend so much on Diyanet but not the firefighting force,” he said, referring to Turkey’s religious authority, which spent over three times more than the forestry directory in the first half of the year, highlighting the latter’s gradual budget cuts over recent years.
‘Expendable’ lives
The United Agricultural and Forestry Workers Union (BTO-SEN) made a statement after the tragedy in Eskişehir, saying: “In this system, the lives of forest and search-and-rescue workers are considered expendable.” Public services are being downsized and positions are being reduced, it added.
“Those responsible are not held accountable. Negligence is turning into a deliberate management choice,” the union argued.
The union’s leader, Mehmet Çak said he thinks the death of 10 workers was also the result of a wider problem of negligence over worker deaths in Turkey.
“The cheapest life there is, is that of a worker,” he told Turkey recap, explaining that most of the complaints he hears from firefighting union members are about the lack of gear and training programs, some of which have been cut in recent years.
One example is the 2019 closure of the Forest Workers Training Center, once located within the Dokuz Eylül University in western Izmir province and one of Turkey’s two major training facilities for wildfire response.
Turkey’s Communications Directorate, which functions under the presidency, on July 27 made a statement, claiming that “the closure of the center did not hinder training activities.” The center was closed after evaluating “efficiency and infrastructure,” the directorate stated.
In 2024, at least 1,897 workers across all sectors died in Turkey, according to Health and Safety Labor Watch. Eight percent of those deaths were attributed to workers in the agriculture and forestry sectors.
Turkey’s forestry directorate did not respond to interview requests with firefighters and survivors for this report despite numerous attempts.
Meanwhile, climate change heightens the risk of wildfires in Turkey, raising the pressure on both firefighters and Turkey’s forests, which cover roughly 29 percent of the country’s surface, according to the Forestry General Directorate.
In 2024, some 3,797 wildfires were reported nationwide, according to official numbers. That is over a thousand more wildfires than a decade ago.
The growing intensity and frequency of wildfires mark not only the landscape, but also the minds of residents who are increasingly impacted by natural disasters.
The first night of the Eskişehir fires, a video from the nearby province of Sakarya showing searing orange flames accompanied by the wails of animals quickly went viral.
For many watching the fires unfold on their screens, the sounds of desperate animals crying and forests charring were more than distressing. They represented a possible glimpse into a future shaped by climate chaos paired with a lack of disaster-readiness.
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