Dozens evacuated as forest fire rages in Czech Republic

PRAGUE: Firefighters in the Czech Republic evacuated dozens of people on Monday as a forest fire ripped through a national park.

The blaze in the Bohemian Switzerland National Park on the Czech-German border comes amid record temperatures.

“Several dozen people had to be evacuated from a tourist resort, a scout camp and from the two communities of Mezna and Mezni Louka threatened by the flames,” Milan Rudolf, spokesman for the Czech fire brigade in the Usti nad Labem region told AFP.

No casualties have been reported but “the situation is critical,” Czech Environment Minister Anna Hubackova wrote on Twitter after visiting the area where the alarm was first raised on Sunday morning.

Forty-six Czech firefighting units tried to extinguish the fire on Monday. They were helped by three German units, which left for the German side of the border where the fire started to spread in the afternoon, Rudolf said.

Temperatures in the Czech Republic have been very high over the past few days, with new records broken on Monday for a July 25, and a maximum of 36.4 degrees Celsius (97.5 degrees Fahrenheit) recorded in the western Pilsen region.