A hospital emptied first thing Wednesday. The 45 patients under treatment at Seydikemer State Hospital were moved to Fethiye as a forest fire ran toward the town, and by afternoon another 202 residents had been taken out of 121 households nearby.
The latest. The fire started at about 7:45am on 29 July 2026 in a field at Bayır Mahallesi, in the Seydikemer district of Muğla, and spread quickly into forest on a strong wind. The Muğla governor's office says the cause has not been determined. Four houses have been damaged, three of them left in ruins. Crews were still fighting the fire in the middle of the afternoon, with the Fethiye-Seydikemer-Antalya road shut to civilian traffic.
What the province put on it
The response reads like a small campaign.
The governor's office counted 23 aircraft over the fire, five planes and 18 helicopters, and 835 people working the line. On the ground it listed 93 fire tenders, 24 water tankers, 23 pieces of heavy machinery, 73 other vehicles, three first-response vehicles and eight ambulances.
The office put the ground total at 137 vehicles. Its own itemized list adds up to 230.
Six of those ground vehicles are TOMA, the armored water cannon trucks normally sent to protests, working here as tankers.
The evacuation ran through Sarıyer Mahallesi and the Bayır, Orta Bayır and Kırsecik areas. Another 50 animals were moved to safe ground, 20 cattle and 30 sheep and goats.
Muğla's metropolitan municipality sent 11 fire vehicles and 27 firefighters, plus an excavator, a grader, water tankers, a bus and a catering truck for the crews. Mayor Ahmet Aras went to the fire area and said every department the city has was on the ground.
The wind was forecast
İbrahim Yumaklı, the agriculture and forestry minister, posted a warning on 28 July that winds reaching 80 km/h (50 mph) were expected in many provinces this week, the coast worst of all.
Strong wind, he wrote, is the main reason fires grow past the point where crews can hold them. He asked people to burn nothing outdoors and named the things that start these fires: a spark, a small ember, a cigarette thrown away still lit.
He also set out what the ministry has: 14 drones, 776 fire watchtowers, 184 of them automated, and 28,000 forestry workers. Then he added the line that reads differently a day later. No technology and no crew, he wrote, counts for as much as the care ordinary people take.
Seydikemer is the second district this week
Fethiye, next door, burned days ago. Fire went through the Gökçeovacık and İnlice neighborhoods, damaging houses and farmland, and Muğla's damage assessment commission is still in those fields working out what people are owed.
Antalya is burning at the same time. A fire that began before dawn on Tuesday at Üzümlü, in the Kaş district, was into its second day on Wednesday, fought by 155 people with 26 tenders across steep, rocky ground. Crews worked it through the night alone, and the helicopters and planes rejoined at first light.
Two more fires broke out on Wednesday morning in Kumluca and were held, one within an hour and one within half of that. The jandarma has opened investigations into how both started. In Seydikemer the cause is undetermined too.
No casualties have been reported.
Four aircraft went to Spain and France
On 28 July, the day before Seydikemer caught, Türkiye sent two firefighting aircraft to France. Two others had gone to Spain on 26 July. Yumaklı announced both deployments, saying they went on Erdoğan's instruction and that Türkiye uses what it has for other countries' forests as well as its own.
Emmanuel Macron quoted that post and answered it in Turkish: "Teşekkürler Türkiye."
It was the third such deployment of the season. The first went on 10 July, when Yumaklı handed a Ka-32 helicopter to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus at Ercan Airport, on temporary assignment for what he called the risky months. That aircraft drops 2.5 tonnes (2.8 US tons) of water in a pass.
Nobody has suggested the loans left Muğla short, and the province had 23 aircraft over Bayır by afternoon. The two things together say something about the size of the fleet a July like this one demands, and how many governments are asking for it at the same time.
The Fethiye-Seydikemer-Antalya road was still shut to civilian traffic on Wednesday afternoon. Drivers were told to find another way around and to keep the hard shoulder clear, because that is the lane the tankers use to get up to the fire.