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“We have a difficult struggle ahead of us.” “It’s not easy,” said Anastasiou, in Agia Anna. Now that the fires are out, Evia faces a hard road. The locals said the houses in the village that are still standing were protected by the residents of the homes themselves. In the village of Achladi, the fire department is now a blackened husk. Instead, volunteer fire corps and locals defied evacuation orders and remained behind, fighting the fires with tree branches, garden hoses and any means they had to ferry water. “We were only protected by God,” Anastasiou said. At one point, he said, a fire-fighting helicopter arrived and he felt hopeful, only to watch the helicopter circle, disperse water and leave. On the other side of the same village, Vaggelis Anastasiou, 62, said he watched the fires spread around the mountain for more than 26 hours. Ioannis Tertipis described firefighters arriving at his village of Agia Anna without water. Yet stories of absent or ineffective firefighters and minimal state response are echoed in most of the villages of Northern Evia. The fires of which we hear nothing, are those that were extinguished in the beginning.” However, the Fire Brigade controlled the vast majority of fires at their start. Mitsotakis directly responded to the criticism of his handling of the fires on Twitter, writing: “Unfortunately we are hearing comments about the Fire Brigade, very unfair to the people who were fighting on the field. And responsibility will be assigned wherever necessary.” “I fully understand the pain of our fellow citizens who saw their homes or property burned,” said Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s Prime Minister, in a public address. In the weeks since the fires on Evia, Greece’s government has scrambled to address issues raised by the blazes and to prepare better for a hotter future. The report said the separation left fire-fighting agencies unable to respond agiley and effectively. The conclusions of the commission, known as the Goldammer Report, included recommendations that Greece streamline its fire-fighting bureaucracy such that there was a clear chain of command, and combine its fire prevention and suppression agencies, which had been separated since the late 1990s.
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#EXTINGUISH FLAMES IN THE VILLAGE LOST TO TIME HOW TO#
In 2018, the Greek government called for a special independent commission to analyze why fires spread and how to prevent them, after a blaze in the seaside town of Mati left 102 dead. Nikos Hardalias, then Greece’s Undersecretary of Citizen protection, conceded in August that only 20 of the country’s 73 firefighting aircraft were operable at the time of the fire.Įxperts also say Greece’s handling of the fires suffered from the country’s unwieldy bureaucracy. On top of this, the Greek fire department has been defunded for years, partially as a result of EU-imposed austerity, leaving it greatly understaffed and with aging equipment. But according to multiple reports, the government’s decision left firefighters without permission to fight the flames when lives weren’t explicitly in danger. This was successful, in part: On Evia, only two fire-related deaths were reported. The government prioritized evacuations over the preservation of land. ‘We Are Only Protected by God’Įven before the fires were fully suppressed, Greece’s government was facing intense criticism for its handling of the situation. The region’s residents say that their struggles are not simply a matter of a warming climate but a confluence of the heat with government negligence and malfeasance. The Greek government has said that the fires were evidence that the “climate crisis is here,” and has promised a speedy revival for the island. It’s that everyone who lives there must figure out how they will survive-their way of life is in danger of disappearing with the smoke. It’s not just that the burnt trees need to be cleaned and the fields re-seeded. Now the whole of northern Evia must find a path to recovery. The pine and olive trees that grew between the villages were reduced to blackened shells, and those not completely torched bear leaves that have been baked to a dry terracotta color. The island lost one third of its forests in under two weeks, as a total of 508,000 acres of land burned. Despite low winds, flames wound their way up and down mountains and around villages. Fires are not uncommon in the pine forests on the island, but this year, during Greece’s worst heat wave in 30 years, they swelled to massive proportions.