Hundreds of firefighters continued on Wednesday in Greece to fight huge forest fires in Greece, one of which has been raging for nine days, which left hundreds of people homeless and caused immense damage. With the help of foreign reinforcements, Greek firefighters are still at work on
Evia island and the Peloponnese peninsula (west), in difficult terrain. “I think we can say that the fire front is slowly being brought under control,” Yiannis Kontzias, the mayor of Istiaia, a small town in Evia, told ERT television.
“Yesterday we saw sunlight for the first time in days,” he added, referring to the huge clouds of smoke covering the island. The situation was more precarious in the mountainous region of Gortynia, rich in dense forests and deep ravines, in the Peloponnese. According to Christos Lambropoulos, deputy governor of the region of Arcadia located in the Peloponnese, the relief efforts are concentrating their efforts to prevent the fire from reaching Mount Menale, topped by a thick forest.
1,200 European firefighters as reinforcements
“The villages do not seem in danger at the moment (…) but the conditions change from hour to hour,” he told ERT. Three people died in the fires, which occurred during Greece’s worst heatwave in decades. Several countries, including members of the EU, sent in reinforcements 21 aircraft, 250 vehicles and more than 1,200 firefighters. Voices were raised to demand the resignation of senior officials responsible for relief, who again in June assured that the country was well prepared.
The means were “better than ever before”, but “we faced an operationally unique situation, with 586 fires in eight days during the worst weather phenomenon for forty years”, the Deputy Minister of Protection was justified on Tuesday. civilian Nikos Hardalias. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Monday asked the Greeks for forgiveness for the “possible mistakes” of the state.
In addition to the destruction of hundreds of homes and a severe blow to the sparse Greek forests, the local economy is devastated. “We lost the month of August, which would have supported people for the year to come. (…) Local tourism has been destroyed, most [des visiteurs] are gone, deplores Mayor Kontzias. The damage is enormous, and the environmental disaster will have economic repercussions for decades ”.