Thousands of people fled the wildfire that was out of control in Greece Turkey, Including a fire in northern Athens, which killed one person. The continuous heat wave turned the forest into a gunpowder box. The flames threatened densely populated areas, power facilities and historical sites.
The wildfire in Turkey has been described as the worst in decades, sweeping across large areas of the southern coast in the past 10 days, killing 8 people.
exist GreeceOn Friday, firefighters were fighting 56 active wildfires, Civil Defense Director Nicos Hadalias said. Several evacuation orders were issued to residential areas on the mainland and the nearby island of Evia, and a fire near Athens destroyed forests and houses on the road leading to Lake Marathon, the capital’s main reservoir.
Hadalias said: “We continue to work hour by hour to deal with the many fires we are facing today.” “The conditions are extremely dangerous.” On Friday afternoon, winds in many parts of Greece increased, increasing the risk of fires.
The main trauma hospital in Athens stated that a 38-year-old man suffered a head injury after falling a telephone pole in Ippokrateios Politeia, one of the communities in northern Athens affected by the fire.
In Evia, the Coast Guard launched a major operation to evacuate hundreds of people at sea, using patrol boats, fishing boats, tourist boats, and private boats to rescue residents and holidaymakers at night and before Friday. Dozens of villages and communities in the southern Peloponnese and the northern Greek capital were emptied as fires spread in the pine forest.
“We are talking about the apocalypse, I don’t know how [else] To describe it,” Sotiris Danikas, head of the coast guard of Edipsos Town, Evia, told the national broadcaster ERT, describing the evacuation at sea.
The Coast Guard said that as of early Friday afternoon, 668 people had been evacuated from the beach in northeastern Evia after the flames cut off all other means of escape. Coast Guard ships continue to patrol the coastline.
A coast guard vessel also rescued another 10 people trapped on the beach by another fire near the town of Gythio in the southern Peloponnese.
Greek and European officials blamed the climate crisis for multiple fires in large areas of the south. Europe, From southern Italy to the Balkans, Greece and Turkey. Fires in Siberia in northern Russia have been burning for weeks, and hot, dry, gusty weather has also contributed to devastating wildfires in California, destroying entire towns in some cases.
Greece experienced the longest heat wave in three decades, with temperatures soaring to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit). Thousands of people fled their homes and holiday houses, and at least 20 people, including four firefighters, were injured and treated. The Ministry of Health stated that two of the firefighters were receiving intensive care in Athens, and the other two were receiving treatment in the hospital for mild burns.
More than 1,000 firefighters and nearly 20 planes are fighting the fires across Greece, while more firefighters, planes, helicopters and vehicles are arriving from France, Switzerland, Romania, Cyprus, Croatia, Israel and Sweden.
In Turkey, the authorities evacuated six other communities near the town of Milas in Mugla Province on Friday after wildfires caused by high winds burned 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the power plant. Officials say that at least 36,000 people have been evacuated to safety in Mugla Province alone.
At the same time, several excavators cleared small strips of land and formed fire belts to prevent flames from spreading to the Yenikoy Power Plant, the second such facility in the area to be threatened by wildfires.
Officials said that wildfires near the tourist resort of Marmaris, also located in Mugla Province, were basically brought under control late Thursday, and by Friday afternoon, two major fires in the neighboring Antalya Province had been brought under control, and Cooling is underway, Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Bekir Pakdemirli wrote on Twitter.
In Greece, firefighters went door-to-door in an area about 12.5 miles north of Athens to ask people to evacuate, while helicopters sprayed water on towering flames, and thick smoke enveloped the area. Authorities sent push alerts to cell phones in the area urging residents to leave, while a refugee camp on the outskirts of the capital was evacuated overnight. The continuing outbreak threatening residential areas hindered the work of hundreds of firefighters there.
The fire caused the interruption of the main road connecting Athens and northern Greece, and the power facilities were damaged. The distribution company announced rolling cuts in the wider capital region to protect the grid.
In the Drosopigi area, resident Giorgos Hatzispiros inspected his home for damage on Friday morning. This was the first time he saw it after being ordered to evacuate the previous afternoon. Only the charred walls of the single-storey house, and his children’s bicycles, somehow remained unscathed in the storage room. Inside, smoke rose from a bookcase that was still smoldering.
“Nothing is left,” Hatzispiros said. He urged his mother to leave, lest she see their destroyed home.
In southern Greece, dozens of villages and settlements were evacuated, and the fire was extinguished before reaching the monument in Olympia, the birthplace of the ancient Olympic Games.
The fire also disrupted Covid-19 vaccination. The Ministry of Health announced the suspension of vaccination at centers in fire-affected areas and stated that appointments can be rescheduled if conditions permit.
In a televised speech on Thursday night, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said: “Our first priority is always to protect human life, followed by the protection of property, the natural environment and critical infrastructure. Unfortunately. The thing is, in this case, it is impossible to achieve all these goals at the same time.”
He said that wildfires showed the reality of the climate crisis.
In 2018, a rapidly spreading forest fire engulfed a seaside settlement east of Athens, killing more than 100 people. Some of them drowned after trying to escape the smoke and flames from the sea after being trapped on the beach.
