Staff Report
Islamabad: After a series of forest fires that engulfed Margalla hills in recent days, a top official in Is-lamabad has revealed that the blaze incidents are in fact owed to human acts and are not a natural oc-currence.
“All the fires are due to someone’s mischief or negligence,” Capital Development Authority Director General (CDA DG) Irfan Niazi said while speaking on local private TV program on Monday.
The official’s remarks come as rescue workers have been engaged in large-scale firefighting operations in the hills surrounding the federal capital throughout last week.
In the latest incident, authorities doused a forest fire in the Hills on Sunday.
Separately, a fire also erupted in the forest area spreading over an area of 15 to 20 acres located in the Baghar Sharif area of Rawalpindi’s Kahuta Tehsil.
Islamabad’s district administration, last week, even took three people into custody on suspicion of Margalla Hills “arson”. “Three persons have been arrested on suspicion of setting fire on Margalla Hills,” Islamabad Deputy Commissioner Irfan Nawaz Memon had said.
Continuing on elaborating on the causes of forest fires, CDA DG Niazi said that the phenomenon re-quires three primary elements namely high temperature, high-speed winds and fuel.
“Since this [Margalla Hills] is a national park, fuel is already available in the shape of dry leaves and branches. In such a situation, due to someone’s mischief or negligence, this can lead to a fire,” he said while pointing towards mischief as there were no species of trees in Islamabad that can catch fire by themselves.
It is to be noted that parts of Pakistan have seen temperatures as high as 52.2 degrees Celsius (126 F) over the last week, with South Asia sweltering in a hotter summer this year — a trend scientists say has been worsened by human-driven climate change.
