July 25 -- STOCKHOLM -- A Swedish military shooting range was bombed on Wednesday as part of efforts to tackle one of the forest fires raging in the country amid exceptionally dry and hot weather.
Swedish firefighters backed by about 340 personnel and firefighting aircraft from several other European Union countries and Norway meanwhile continued to battle a series of forest fires across the country.
The Swedish air force dropped a bomb at noon local time as part of an unconventional method to tackle the blaze that has engulfed the Tranglset shooting range in the county of Dalarna in central Sweden.
The explosion aimed at depriving the fire of oxygen and the method was to be deployed in a "worst-case scenario," said emergency services spokesman Johan Szymanski.
Undetonated ammunition at the shooting range has hampered efforts to tackle the blaze as firefighters have had to keep a safe distance, and the terrain is very tough.
"Our preliminary assessment is that it has had a very good effect," Szymanski told reporters after the test.
Szymanski said that other fires within 100 metres of the bomb target were extinguished, while fires further away were not fanned.
A jet fighter dropped the bomb from an altitude of 3,000 metres, said Anders Persson of the Swedish airforce.
Swedish emergency services, SOS Alarm, on Wednesday afternoon reported 42 fires, up from 25 earlier in the day after the slightly cooler conditions overnight.
The fires broke out earlier this month and have spread quickly due to extremely dry and hot weather conditions. Strong rains have not been seen for weeks, and high temperatures have given Sweden its hottest July for at least 260 years, according to the weather service.
The fires have affected an estimated 250 square kilometres. The Swedish Forest Agency saying that forests worth about 900 million kronor (101 million dollars) have been hit by the blazes, though some of the affected timber can be used for construction purposes.
In a bid to avert the outbreak of new forest fires, the national Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) urged local and regional authorities to tighten bans on lighting open fires and ban the use of barbecue grills in private gardens.
"The risk of fires will reach extreme levels at the end of the week in Sweden. Therefore bans on fires need to be tightened to avert new fires from occurring," MSB spokeswoman Anneli Bergholm Soder said.
The largest fires in the country continued to burn in central Sweden, a few hundred kilometres north of the capital in the counties of Gavleborg, Jamtland and Dalarna.
Bergholm Soder said the overall situation in the northern part of the country had somewhat stabilized but cautioned that fires can break out "very rapidly."
Control lines along the perimeters of the main fires appeared to be holding, she added.
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