There are eight fires still burning in Mugla, the ministry said in a statement. The southwestern tourism province’s Milas and Marmaris districts remain the most affected in the area.

A total of 83,810 hectares of forest area has burned down in the fires that started on July 28, Gebze Technical University researchers told state-run Anadolu Agency.

The fire in the southern Antalya province’s Manavgat district encompassed some 140,850 acres to date, GTU’s topographical engineering researchers said, based on analyses of European Space Agency’s Sentinel 2 satellite imagery. The Manavgat fire has gone down in history as the greatest fire disaster in Turkey, they said.

Mugla’s Gokova, home to many bays and coves, suffered greatly in the fires.

“More than 50,000 acres of forests burned down, and we still don’t know where it will stop,” Mugla local Ayhan Karahan told daily BirGun newspaper. Residents in the area fear a wave of real estate development to hit the now-blackened coastline. “We don’t believe in promises of reforestation,” Karahan said. “That is what they said for the burned area 10, 20 years ago, but they put up concrete walls.”

Chambers of Electronics Engineers, Chemical Engineers, Mining Engineers and Mechanical Engineers issued a joint statement on Saturday, condemning what they called the government’s incompetence in disaster management and called for the protection of coal mines and thermal power plants.

Turkey has left its own firefighting planes inactive and chosen to rent planes from other countries at exorbitant prices, instead of buying new planes, the engineers said.

In the last 12 years, the amount of scorched area per wildfire has gone up by a staggering 141.6 percent, forestry policy expert Dr Erdogan Atmis wrote for BirGun, showing a failure in disaster management.

The largest increase happened in the last three years, with 58.7 percent, Atmis said. The increase coincides with the appointment of current Forestry Minister Bekir Pakdemirli, he added, however, it also coincides with ministers losing much of their authority to the president in Turkey abandoning its parliamentary system in favor of an executive presidential one.

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