Authorities evacuated nearly 2,500 people from the Greek island of Corfu on Monday as the prime minister warned that the heat-battered nation was “at war” with several wildfires and spoke of three difficult days ahead.
Tens of thousands of people have already fled blazes on the island of Rhodes, with many frightened tourists scrambling to get home on evacuation flights.
About 2,400 visitors and locals were evacuated from the Ionian tourist island of Corfu from Sunday into Monday, a fire service spokesman said, adding that the departures were a precaution.
Fires were also burning on Greece’s second largest island of Evia on Monday.
“We are at war and are exclusively geared toward the fire front,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told parliament, warning that the nation faced “another three difficult days ahead” before high temperatures are forecast to ease.
Vassilis Kikilias, Greece’s civil protection minister, said crews had battled over 500 fires around the country for 12 straight days.
Greece has been sweltering under a lengthy spell of extreme heat that has exacerbated wildfire risk and left visitors stranded in peak tourist season.
The government’s speedy evacuation came after a tragedy in 2018 when over 100 people perished in Greece’s deadliest forest fire at Mati, near Athens, which Mitsotakis on Monday said still “haunts us all.”
Because of the wildfires, an annual celebration on Monday to mark the 1974 restoration of democracy in Greece was canceled.
Rhodes, which counted 2.5 million visitor arrivals in 2022, is one of Greece’s leading holiday destinations.
Travel giant TUI on Monday said it was suspending holiday packages to Rhodes until Friday.
Greek television broadcast images of long lines of people, some in beachwear, lugging suitcases along the island’s roads on Saturday, when the evacuations were ordered.
“We walked for about six hours in the heat,” Kelly Squirrel, a transport administrator from the United Kingdom, told AFP at Rhodes airport.
Some 30,000 people fled the flames on Rhodes at the weekend, the country’s largest-ever wildfire evacuation.
Police said 16,000 people had been transported on land and 3,000 evacuated by sea. Others had to flee by road or used their own transport after being told to leave the area.
“We are exhausted and traumatized,” said Daniel-Cladin Schmidt, a 42-year-old German tourist waiting to be evacuated with his wife and nine-year-old son.
“There were thousands of people, the buses couldn’t pass, we had to walk for more than two hours,” he told AFP at the airport.
“We couldn’t breathe, we just covered our faces and moved forward.”
Holiday-makers and some locals spent the night in gyms, schools and hotel conference centers on the island.
In the departures hall of the international airport, AFP saw groups of tourists sleeping on the floor, surrounded by luggage.
“We had to lend a woman some of my wife’s clothes because she had nothing to wear,” Kevin Sales, an engineer from England, told AFP. “It was terrible.”
Several travel companies have halted their inbound tourist flights to Rhodes, and have been helping to ferry foreigners home.
“We ran 10 kilometers (six miles) with all our luggage to escape the flames,” while the temperature was 42 degrees Celsius (108 degrees Fahrenheit), said German tourist Lena Schwarz, after arriving at Hanover airport overnight Sunday into Monday.
The 38-year-old told AFP their journey leaving Rhodes was “hell on Earth.”
Oxana Neb, 50, also arriving at Hanover, said the evacuation had been “very bad.”
“We stayed in the hotel until the end and fire came from all sides,” she said.
She joined other guests running to the beach, eventually abandoning her suitcases on the way, she said.
Like every summer, Greece is plagued by forest fires, often deadly, ravaging tens of thousands of hectares of forest and vegetation.
This summer, Greece experienced one of the longest heatwaves in recent years, according to experts, with the thermometer hitting 45 degrees Celsius at the weekend.
Temperatures eased Monday but were expected to to pick up again on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Rhodes on Tuesday remains at the highest level of fire alert, alongside Crete.

Source: Arab News

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Evacuation orders have been issued for areas close to two central Greek cities threatened by new outbreaks of wildfires.

Citizens in areas around Volos and Lamia have been told to move to safety as the country remains in the grip of a severe heatwave.

Meanwhile, fires continue to rage on the islands of Rhodes, Corfu and Evia.

Greece is one of a number of countries currently grappling with wildfires, in which more than 40 people have died.

Two people have died in the fires near Volos, the fire service has confirmed – a farmer who died after he went to release his sheep to protect them, and a woman who was in a mobile home in Chorostasi.

Kostas Agorastos, mayor of Greece’s Thessaly region, which includes Volos, has accused “brainless workers” of starting the fire, according to the Ellada 24 news channel.

He added that it had broken out on four simultaneous fronts.

In Rhodes, where a state of emergency is in place and from where thousands of tourists have been forced to flee, high winds have continued to fan the flames and villages remain at risk.

Some firefighters, who have been battling the blazes for days, have begun to lose hope.

“Every day, every night, we are here and we achieve nothing,” Savas Filaderis, who is from Rhodes, told the Reuters news agency.

“We can’t stop it,” he said.

“Everybody, all the people, they fight. The civil people, the government, they are but… for nothing. I believe we fight for nothing.”

In southern Italy, fires in Sicily and Puglia have also been fuelled by high winds and tinder-dry vegetation, meaning firefighters have been struggling in many areas to douse the flames and create firebreaks.

The church of St Benedict the Moor in the Sicilian city of Palermo was among the buildings that have been destroyed in the fires.

“The damage is enormous,” said Vincenzo Bruccoleri, superior friar of the convent.

Enrico Trantino, the mayor of Catania, another city on the island, told the BBC the high temperatures had melted underground electrical cables, which had left parts of the city without power and water.

However, Italy is expected to become much cooler in the coming days, according to BBC Weather.

The heaviest death toll so far is in Algeria, with more than 30 victims, including 10 soldiers surrounded by flames during an evacuation in the coastal province of Bejaia, east of Algiers.

Most of the fires have now been contained.

In neighbouring Tunisia, the country’s Interior Minister, Kamel Feki, said on Wednesday that all of the wildfires were under control and there had been no loss of life.

The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, said support was being sent to affected countries, including Tunisia and Greece.

But Yamina Saheb, lead author on the United Nations’ climate change panel, known as the IPCC, told the BBC that people in the African region felt they were being left to fend for themselves without international help.

“People are scared and they don’t really understand why there is no international help,” she said.

Ms Saheb said she had spoken to friends and colleagues in the affected areas, who were finding it hard to understand why there was no European aid when they were so close to the continent.

“They say, if the situation gets worse, what are we going to do? Are we going to die, all of us? Is Africa going to die because of climate change, and Europe will be watching that, just watching and not doing anything?”

Residents in Algeria return to areas blackened by wildfires

The EU has also said it wants to sign contracts for up to 12 firefighting planes in order to improve its ability to fight blazes fuelled by climate change. These would be the first it would fully own.

A team of climate scientists – the World Weather Attribution group – said this month’s intense heatwave in Southern Europe, North America and China would have been virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.

• Greece fires in maps and satellite images
• How climate change affects heatwaves and wildfires
• Wildfires in Greece in pictures

The fires have dealt a blow to the summer tourism industry, especially in Greece, where the industry accounts for one in five jobs and is vital for Rhodes and many other islands.

Holiday firms Jet2 and Tui have cancelled departures to the island for the coming days.

Tui said that it had already brought hundreds of people home, while hundreds more were expected to make it back to the UK on Wednesday.

The UK Foreign Office has not advised against travel to the affected parts of Greece, but has urged tourists to check with tour operators for updates.

Thousands of people have also been evacuated on Evia and Corfu, while Crete – another major holiday destination – is on high alert.

Other European countries have not escaped the heatwave unscathed. Portugal, Croatia and the French Mediterranean Island of Corsica are among other places that have experienced wildfires in recent days.

Source: BBC

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A fire at Türkiye’s Iskenderun port in the southern Hatay province has been extinguished and maritime operations have resumed in the region, the country’s maritime authority said on Friday, four days after the blaze broke out following earthquakes that struck the region.

More than a thousand containers, which had caught fire, are being separated and the rebuilding of the port will begin swiftly, the source added.

Another source at the port said smoke was still rising from the scene as cooling operations continued.

“The fire is completely extinguished but the smoke is rising. Barring an extraordinary scenario, it looks like there is no chance for the fire to erupt again, but cooling operations will last three more days,” the person said.

Operations at the port were halted earlier and freighters were diverted to other ports.

The latest death toll from Monday’s earthquake was revealed as 18,991 on Friday while another 75,523 people were injured, according to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğan also said that over 76,000 quake victims so far have been evacuated from the earthquake zones to different provinces.

Source : Daily Sabah

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