Firefighters on Monday battled heat and suffocating smoke for a seventh consecutive day to undertake to save lots of the Greek island of Evia from wildfires that have exhausted many homes and made thousands to escape .
Greece and Turkey are battling devastating blazes for nearly fortnight because the region suffers its worst heatwave in decades.
Greek officials have already blamed global climate change for the acute heat, and therefore the UN released a serious report on Monday showing how the threat from warming is even more acute than previously thought. Two people are confirmed dead in Greece and eight in Turkey, while dozens are hospitalised.
Greece said vital aerial reinforcements were on the way to Evia to assist firefighters, with Russia and Turkey promising to assist .
Many of the opposite fires that have hit Greece have stabilised or receded, but on Evia — Greece’s second largest island after Crete — the blazes are being helped by wind and a rugged, forested landscape.
Firefighters told local media their priority was to prevent the fires from reaching thick forest within the north of Evia. Some residents said that they had ignored evacuation orders to remain behind and save their homes.
As the sweeping wall of fireside laid siege to at least one village after another within the north of the island, firefighters toiled to guard the town of Istiaia.
Thick and suffocating smoke on Monday also enveloped the coastal region of Pefki, where many villagers had been evacuated by sea.
The Greek coastguard said over 2,700 people had been evacuated by its forces and by private vessels over the last 10 days, most of them from Evia.
This included some 350 people evacuated from villages around Pefki, many of whom spent the night during a ferry moored near the Long Beach . Looming within the haze offshore, a military ship awaited further evacuees.
The ferry “was the sole place where people could get a touch peace and security”, military official Panagiotis Charalambos said.
Like many nearby communities, Pefki “had no electricity or water”, he said. “Here, the people lived from the forest, from the crops, olives and tourism. There’s nothing of that left now,” said Louisa, a pensioner in Pefki.
In the town of Aidipsos, collections of basic necessities were organised for villagers who had lost everything within the fire.
While rain brought some respite from the blazes in Turkey over the weekend, Greece has this month suffered an intense heatwave that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said should show the hard reality of global climate change even to doubters.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on global climate change laid bare the challenges facing the earth with a serious report on Monday.
The IPCC said global temperatures would probably hit the extent of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by around 2030 — a decade before it projected just three years ago
Meanwhile the EU said it had been mobilising “one of Europe’s biggest ever common firefighting operations” to help Greece and other countries. The response was needed “as multiple fires affect several countries simultaneously”, EU crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarcic said.
