“My cart was burnt and all the second-hand clothing were no longer suitable for sale,” said 36-year-old Ahmad Zaytoun after a fire broke out in Nabi-Yunis market in Mosul.
Ahmad used to sell second hand clothing on his cart at that market.
“In 2020, several dangerous fires broke out,” Zaytoun said. The latest was at a market in the Nabi-Yunis area in Mosul where second-hand clothes are sold.
According to the authorities, the fire was caused by an electric short-circuit.
“The fire broke out on the night of 7 December 2020 and caught all the carts in the market. Despite being in debt, a number of the vendors have not been compensated yet.”
According to numbers from the Civil Defence Directorate, with 594 incidents, the Nineveh province was second on the list of most fire breakouts. The first being Baghdad province, where 575 fire breakouts took place.
Fire cause by lightning
On the night of 2 September 2020, lightning caused a storage tank catch fire in the refinery in Qayyara. It took 23 teams of firefighters to extinguish it.
At the time, the Civil Defence said in a statement that their teams managed to empty the tank of its 5 million litres content of fuel.
footage of the fire at the Qayyara refinery
The government agency for monitoring weather and seismic activities said in a statement on the same day that lightning hit elevated locations, among them a reservoir tank at Qayyara refinery.
Thousands of hectares of grains were burnt
Major General Kadhim Burhan, head of the Civil Defence Directorate at the Interior Ministry, had told KirkukNow previously that from the start of the year 2020 to the end of July, 64 fire outbreaks were registered in Nineveh, causing the destruction of about 1500 hectares (15 square kilometres) of grain fields.
Within the same period, firefighters have managed to save about the same size of area of grain fields from getting destroyed by fire.
15-hour-long burning fire
ON 12 February 2020, fire broke out at an electronic appliances market in Mosul. It took 15 hours for local firefighters with the help of their colleagues from the Kurdistan Region to put it out.
A number of fighter fighters sustained injuries while trying to control the fire. Five residential homes in the vicinity were also damaged.
Due to the ISIS war, the Civil Defence in Nineveh has lost much of its capacity and equipment. They have repeatedly been asking for replenishment from the government even since.
