The battle to contain wildfires across Greece continued for a seventh straight day as firefighters struggled to extinguish flames amid scenes of pandemonium prompted by the nation’s biggest ever evacuation of tourists on inferno-stricken Rhodes.
With the aid of water-dropping planes, authorities worked around the clock to tame numerous fires. While the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, said it was clear the country was “at war with fire”, efforts were being concentrated on dousing blazes raging on the islands of Evia and Corfu, in addition to Rhodes.
“This battle is uneven, and it will keep being like that for as long as the conditions remain hard,” the centre-right leader told the Greek parliament.
Warning that “three difficult days” lay ahead with the prediction that temperatures would rise, he added: “We find ourselves at war with fire.”
As wind-whipped infernos raged across soil parched by searing heat, authorities also stepped up evacuations, ordering people to leave hotels and homes.
Overnight, an estimated 2,466 citizens had fled dwellings in 17 villages along Corfu’s northern coast, an area popular with villa-owning Britons, while hundreds had been forced to evacuate communities on Evia.
The latest evacuations came days after incoming infernos around resort areas in the south-east of Rhodes forced what officials described as the biggest evacuation in Greek history, which saw 19,000 people – mostly tourists – moved to the island’s north across land and sea.
Holidaymakers recounted panic-stricken moments of being transported at the weekend in the middle of the night in army trucks to beaches before being placed on Greek navy ships.
A common refrain was the shoddy treatment received at the hands of “invisible” tour operators to whom they had paid thousands of pounds to stay in five-star hotels on the island.
Many voiced shock that other British tourists had been flown into the island by travel companies as late as Saturday night when it was clear the fires were raging uncontrollably across a large swath of the island.
Greece experienced the hottest temperatures in 50 years at the weekend, with the mercury reaching 45C in the central region of Thessaly. The hot, dry, windy conditions have been likened to “super food” for fires.
The human-caused climate crisis has increased the wildfire season by about two weeks on average across the globe and is responsible for a higher likelihood of fire and bigger burned areas in southern Europe.
In the face of strong and erratic winds fanning flames, civil protection officials in Athens said they had been left with little choice other than to enact what they called a “precautionary” operation to move tourists out of harm’s way on Rhodes.
“Our priority will always be human life,” Mitsotakis told MPs on Monday, invoking memories of the tragedy of the fires that tore through the seaside town of Mati, east of Athens, almost five years ago, incinerating 102 people in their homes and cars. “[Since Mati,] we have learned to organise evacuations,” he said.
Government experts are scheduled to fly into Rhodes and other fire-hit regions in the coming days to assess the scale of the disaster – expected to be hugely costly – so that the process of compensatory payments can begin. Countless homes, businesses and plots of arable land are believed to have been lost to the flames.
But for now the emphasis has been on salvaging the image of Greece as a tourist destination in the face of such disaster.
Most of those evacuated from hotels in Rhodes had arrived from the UK – a market so buoyant, British tourists now account for the largest number of visitors to Greece.
Given the sector’s significance – tourism provides 25% of the country’s GDP and one in five jobs – the country’s tourism minister, Olga Kefalogianni, was at pains on Monday to insist that although fires had broken out on Corfu, the situation was not “alarming”, while in Rhodes “only a small part of the island” had been affected.
In what by late Sunday had become a large-scale military operation, Greek army transport planes worked through the night to transfer camp beds, sleeping bags and other vital supplies to Rhodes.
Throughout the weekend, thousands had been forced to sleep rough, either at the island’s airport or in other makeshift shelters including schools and conferences halls.
“The hope is that what is being brought in will make life a little bit more comfortable for them before they go back home,” one official said.
Tourists stranded on Rhodes spoke of the kindness and generosity of locals, many of whom had offered to host evacuated families in their homes.
By 6am on Monday, 1,489 tourists from the UK, Germany and Italy had been repatriated, Greek government sources said, adding that the departures had eased the chaotic scenes at the island’s airport.
The tour company Jet2 announced that it had scheduled an extra four flights for Monday evening to take Britons home.
Firefighting forces from around the world have arrived in Greece to assist in the battle to bring the fires under control.
