By Stamos Prousalis and Stelios Misinas
ATHENS (Reuters) – Fires raged across Greece on Wednesday, destroying forests on Rhodes and gutting homes close to Athens as a new heatwave loomed and threatened to further stoke tinderbox conditions across the country.
Firefighters backed with air water bombers battled a resurgence of flames west of Athens which prompted mass evacuations on Tuesday. Fresh evacuation orders were issued on Wednesday for three areas threatened by encroaching flames.
On the island of Rhodes, authorities sent reinforcements to combat a fire which erupted in a densely wooded mountainous area and ordered the evacuation of three villages as a precaution.
“The biggest front now is the fire on Rhodes, its not close to villages but it is big,” a fire brigade official said.
Fires are common in Greece, but hotter and drier summers have turned the Mediterranean into a wildfire hotspot in recent years.
Four aircraft sent from Italy and France joined firefighting efforts on Wednesday, authorities said. Firefighters across the country, boosted by crews from Romania, Poland and Slovakia, have been deployed to help battle the blazes.
Israel will send two firefighting planes to Greece to assist the firefighting effort and will stay there as long as required, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
‘ON HIGH ALERT’
The Greek meteorological service had warned of a heightened risk of fires this week, as the country recovers from the first major heatwave of the summer.
A second heatwave was forecast to start on Thursday, with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees celcius in some areas, and rising further on Friday to a maximum of 44, it said.
Temperatures were expected to abate on Monday, but a fresh bout of higher temperatures was expected from Tuesday until Thursday next week.
“Conditions are extreme, and are likely to be so for another week,” Kostas Tsigas, head of the fire brigade officers association, told Greece’s SKAI TV.
The blaze, which broke out on Monday in the region of Dervenochoria, about 30 km north of Athens, spread rapidly as it was fanned by winds and reached the town of Mandra on Tuesday, burning houses and forcing people to flee.
Not everyone went willingly. Footage by Greek police showed officers imploring a reluctant group of nuns chanting hymns to evacuate a convent, and another of police screaming “let’s go” as towering flames closed in at a timber yard.
“We put all our effort into making this, we built this, and now it’s all gone,” said Andreas Theodosiadis, a resident of Mandra, standing near debris and cars hollowed out by fire.
The broader region has had bitter previous experience with natural disasters. In 2017, Mandra, a largely industrial area, was hit by flash floods that killed 24 people.
A year later, 101 people died in the seaside town of Mati, east of Athens, which was razed by a wildfire in a matter of hours.
(Reporting by Stamos Prousalis, Lefteris Papadimas and Renee Maltezou in Greece, additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem; writing by Michele Kambas; Editing by David Holmes, Bernadette Baum and Deepa Babington)
