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Hundreds of firefighters backed up by helicopters and water-carrying planes battled a huge wildfire on Greece‘s second-biggest island for a second day on Tuesday as authorities ordered the evacuation of two villages.
The fire broke out near the village of Petries in the centre of the island of Evia at about 3 pm on Monday and strong winds fuelled its spread.
Evia was struck by massive wildfires in 2021 and also suffered extensive damage last summer. Monday’s fire followed successive heat waves across southern Europe in recent weeks.
While the situation had slightly improved on Tuesday, flare ups remain a risk due to the windy conditions, a fire service spokesperson said.
Thirteen aircraft and six helicopters were at the scene on Tuesday about 60 km (37 miles) northeast of the capital, Athens. A coastguard vessel was on standby overnight for possible evacuations by sea.
“It was - and is - a difficult fire as it started in a difficult spot,” Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Minister Vassilis Kikilias, who travelled to Evia late on Monday, was quoted as saying by state broadcaster ERT.
Wildfires in Greece have become more frequent in recent years during increasingly hot, dry summers that scientists link to climate change. Last year, more than 8,000 blazes broke out, fire brigade data shows.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Greece had been dealing with “a very difficult summer” in terms of climate conditions.
“We still have a very difficult month, August, ahead of us and obviously we all need to be on high alert,” he told ministers during a cabinet meeting.
Since May, hundreds of wildfires have burned across the country, which just recorded its hottest June on record and its longest heatwave. Blazes have been turbocharged by strong winds and drought in several parts of the country.
In 2021, a devastating wildfire raged for nearly a week in northern Evia, turning more than 115,000 acres (46,500 hectares) of land into ashes, destroying homes and killing animals.
The risk of fire in some areas of Greece was rated as very high (category 4) on Tuesday, according to a forecast map.
The areas at risk include are Attica (including the island of Kythera), Central Greece (Viotia, Evia, Fthiotida), the Peloponnese (Corinthia, Argolis and Lakonia), Thessaly (Larissa, Magnesia and the Sporades Islands), Central Macedonia (Thessaloniki and Kilkis), Crete, the Ionian Islands (Corfu) and the islands of the north Aegean (Lesvos, Chios, Samos and Ikaria).
Last week UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called for countries to address the urgency of the extreme heat epidemic, fueled by climate change - days after the world registered its hottest day on record.
“Extreme heat is the new abnormal,” Guterres said. “The world must rise to the challenge of rising temperatures,” he said.
Climate change is making heatwaves more frequent, more intense and longer lasting across the world.
Already this year, scorching conditions have killed 1,300 hajj pilgrims, closed schools for some 80 million children in Africa and Asia, and led to a spike in hospitalizations and deaths in the Sahel.
Every month since June 2023 has now ranked as the planet’s warmest since records began in 1940, compared with the corresponding month in previous years, according the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
