Fire toll mounts in Greece as blazes spread

ATHENS – Greece on Aug 2 faced multiple fronts and a growing damage toll after a week of wildfires devastated over 12,000ha of forest and agricultural land, experts said.

The National Observatory’s climate tracker meteo.gr said over 6,500ha had been burned in separate fires on the Gulf of Corinth that swept through the popular coastal village of Porto Germeno near Athens.

The village was evacuated when the fire broke out on July 31, but the local authorities say scores of homes were damaged or destroyed.

Earlier, fires on the islands of Crete and Paros affected another 6,000ha, meteo.gr said.

With violent winds blowing for most of the week, firefighters have faced dozens of fires daily and Greece’s Civil Protection Minister Evangelos Tournas on Aug 1 said the fire department had been “pushed to its limits”.

Three firefighters died in the line of duty, two in Crete and one in the Peloponnese.

Gale-force winds created “extremely difficult conditions resulting in many cases where aircraft either cannot draw water or cannot carry out drops due to extreme turbulence”, Tournas said.

Though the winds eased late on Aug 1, the greater Athens area and nearby Voiotia and the island of Evia were under near maximum fire risk on Aug 2, the civil protection ministry said.

Nearly 500 firefighters were battling blazes in the Porto Germeno area, some 70km north-west of Athens, the fire department said.

Some 100 firefighters were fighting another blaze in Aigialia in the northern Peloponnese.

Three firefighters died in the line of duty while fighting the wildfires. PHOTO: AFP

A new fire broke out late on Aug 1 on the Ionian Sea island of Cephalonia.

Hit hard by the climate crisis like the rest of the Mediterranean region, the country is plagued by wildfires every summer due to high temperatures, frequent heat waves and drought.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis warned that Greece – which had been relatively spared from heat waves and major fires earlier in the summer of 2026, unlike France and Spain – was headed for “difficult days”. AFP