A fire has destroyed more than 15 acres of a state-owned teak reserve in the Monaragala District, burning through the afternoon and evening of Sunday, Hiru News reported.
The blaze broke out in a government teak plantation near the Aliyagala area of Hulandawa South, and had spread across more than 15 acres by the time of the report. Residents said the fire was moving very quickly because of the prevailing dry weather.
Large numbers of teak and other commercially valuable trees were being destroyed as the fire advanced, and residents warned that it remained at risk of spreading further. Hiru did not report whether fire crews, forest conservation officers or the security forces had reached the site, and gave no cause for the fire.
A second reserve fire in a day
The Monaragala blaze is the second fire in a protected or state-managed forest reported in Sri Lanka on Sunday. Earlier the same afternoon, more than 100 acres burned in the Hurulu reserve at Habarana in the North Central Province, where forest conservation officials said fires are frequently started deliberately by hunters entering the forest illegally.
Both fires fall in the closing weeks of the dry season, when leaf litter and undergrowth in the dry zone cure and any ignition can spread rapidly across open scrub. A fire in a forest at Hali Ela in Badulla earlier in the month followed the same pattern.
The district at the centre of the dry spell
Monaragala is the district worst affected by Sri Lanka’s current El Niño-linked dry spell. Of the 81,865 people across seven districts recorded as affected by the Disaster Management Centre, 33,023 are in Monaragala — roughly two in every five nationally — drawn from 10,264 families across seven divisional secretariat divisions.
The Department of Meteorology has placed the likelihood of the current El Niño persisting into the first quarter of next year at 97%, and has issued repeated heat advisories covering Monaragala through the past week.
Teak is grown in managed state plantations in the district and is a long-rotation timber crop, meaning burnt stands represent losses accumulated over decades rather than a single season.
