‘War zone’: Thousands evacuated from Greek islands as fires spread
Australians who escaped the fire-ravaged Greek island of Rhodes have told of the panic and chaos during their evacuation. Warning: Graphic
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Authorities evacuated nearly 2,500 people from the Ionian island of Corfu on Monday as heat-battered Greece found itself “at war” with several wildfires burning out of control.
Last week, thousands of children were evacuated from Athens’ holiday villages and over the weekend, tens of thousands of people fled blazes on the large island of Rhodes in the Southeast Aegean, with terrified tourists scrambling to get home on evacuation flights.
Some 30,000 people fled the flames on Rhodes at the weekend, the country’s largest-ever wildfire evacuation.
The local Australian Ambassador has issued advice to Australians in need of consular assistance in Rhodes or other parts of Greece affected by wildfires, urging them to call +61 2 6261 3305 and also follow the advice of local authorities.
Several European countries set up consular offices at the Rhodes airport on Sunday evening to help their nationals fly back.
Laura Bentley, who was travelling with her Australian husband, feared for their daughter, five, when they were forced to flee the Princess Andriana Resort, near Kiotari, Rhodes on Saturday when high winds and temperatures whipped the blazes to apocalyptic proportions.
“On the Friday when it happened, we were told to evacuate and couldn’t get our bags at the hotel, so we left with what we were wearing,” she said.
She described fleeing on foot in 40C heat.
“We had friends with small children. Some said they could feel the heat of the flames growing closer and feared.
“The firefighters shouted at us ‘Madam, your life! Leave! Leave everything behind!”
“We saw queues of people just walking in the heat. We found a hotel and sought refuge.
“We were worried for our little one, she was crying a lot and was really clinging,” said Ms Bentley.
As the flames marched down hill, thousands of people made their way in procession towards the coast and the safety of the sea.
“It was the scariest moment in my entire life, it was mass panic,” said Claire Caine, who also had to flee the Princess Andriana Resort, near Kiotari, with her husband Scott and their three children 9, 13 and 13.
“We didn’t know what the next steps were, kept making decisions based on what we felt at the time because no one was helping or giving us instructions,” she said.
“We literally had to run from the hotel for our lives. I can still smell the ash on me, I’ll never get over that, it was a horrible experience, to think you might never come out alive.”
Eileen Johnston, 70, from Hendon, northwest London, watched the flames encroach her hotel in Lindos Village in Rhodes for days but it was only when the fire knocked at her hotel door that the staff told her to evacuate.
“The hotel kept telling us not to leave, that it was fine but it wasn’t, on Sunday it just blew up,” she said.
“It was horrific, horrific, disorganised chaos,” she said upon her return to the UK at Stansted Airport on Monday.
“I saw this huge ball of fire coming towards me. Eventually the fire alarm went off and staff shouted ‘evacuate, evacuate,’” she said.
She was among hundreds of holiday-makers, including a young Australian couple and their several month old baby, who described being abandoned by travel companies as they ran for their lives from one of the worst wildfires ever to strike the island.
“We ran, and I fell over in the ground in the rush,” she said.
“I looked to help the Australian couple but I lost them in the smoke,” she said.
“Buses didn’t turn up, the ones that did were full or had queues of people. It was a nightmare and no reps from any of the companies helped us.
“They told us to go up the hill, then they told us to make our way to where it was safe at the sea but in the end we had to walk five miles to school.
The flames were huge, the sky was thick with smoke.
“We had to lie on towels on the ground for days at the school before we found a hotel… for a fortune, mind you, and on top of it, I’ve got no luggage.
“We shouldn’t be going to any countries with bush fires, the government needs to send warnings to holiday-makers not to go abroad while Europe’s weather is a catastrophe.”
Claire Caine, who had to be evacuated from Rhodes with her husband Scott and three teenage children, agreed.
“We are at war and are exclusively geared towards the fire front,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told parliament on Monday, warning that the nation faced “another three difficult days ahead” before high temperatures are forecast to ease.
Greece has been sweltering under a lengthy spell of extreme heat that has exacerbated wildfire risk and left visitors stranded in peak tourist season.
Kelly Squirrel, a transport administrator from the United Kingdom, said police had ordered people from her hotel on Rhodes to evacuate.
“We had to keep walking,” she told AFP at the international airport. “So we walked for about six hours in the heat.”
Greek television broadcast images of long lines of people, some in beachwear, lugging suitcases along the island’s roads on Saturday, when the evacuations were ordered.
Police said 16,000 people had been transported on land and evacuated 3,000 by sea. Others had to flee by road or used their own transport after being told to leave the area.
“We are exhausted and traumatised,” said Daniel-Cladin Schmidt, a 42-year-old German tourist waiting to be evacuated with his wife and nine-year-old son.
“There were thousands of people, the buses couldn’t pass, we had to walk for more than two hours,” he told AFP at Rhodes airport.
“We couldn’t breathe, we just covered our faces and moved forward.”
Holiday-makers and some locals spent the night in gyms, schools and hotel conference centres on the island.
In the departures hall of the international airport, AFP saw groups of tourists sleeping on the floor, surrounded by luggage.
“We had to lend a woman some of my wife’s clothes because she had nothing to wear,” Kevin Sales, an engineer from England, told AFP. “It was terrible.”
Several travel companies have halted their inbound tourist flights to Rhodes, and have been helping to ferry foreigners home.
“We ran 10 kilometres with all our luggage to escape the flames”, while the temperature was 42 degrees Celsius, said German tourist Lena Schwarz, after arriving at Hanover airport overnight Sunday into Monday.
The 38-year-old told AFP their journey leaving Rhodes was “hell on Earth”.
Oxana Neb, 50, also arriving at Hanover, said the evacuation had been “very bad”.
“We stayed in the hotel until the end and fire came from all sides,” she said. She joined other guests running to the beach, eventually abandoning her suitcases on the way, she said.
Crews have been battling the flames in parts of Greece for about a week, and firefighters were from dawn on Monday using aircraft to try to douse the flames on Rhodes.
According to the authorities, many regions were under extreme risk of forest fires on Monday, but no towns were directly threatened by flames, the fire service told AFP.
Like every summer, Greece is plagued by forest fires, often deadly, ravaging tens of thousands of hectares of forest and vegetation.
This summer, the country experienced one of the longest heatwaves in recent years, according to experts, with the thermometer hitting 45 degrees Celsius at the weekend.
On Monday, the heat was expected to ease slightly with temperatures expected to reach 37C in Athens, but on Tuesday, it was forecast to pick up again.
“It’s getting better but a lot of planes are full, so you have to be patient. The situation should normalise in a few days,” said a French consulate representative, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The island of Rhodes has now been on fire for a week. Temperatures, which reached 45 degrees Celsius in central Greece on Sunday, were expected to dip on Monday before the mercury rises again for another four-day heatwave.
The fire service is not ruling out the possibility of arson, but local resident Maria Dalouka says it’s now painfully clear that people need to take better care about leaving flammable waste in wooded areas.
“It’s not like the old days, climate change has impacted us and will continue to do so,” said the 66-year-old, who owns a cafe in the fire-ravaged village of Kiotari.
“We ask for help from all of Europe... everything is black, please come and let’s plant some trees,” she said.
“This is the biggest fire evacuation ever in Greece,” Konstantia Dimoglidou, Greek police spokeswoman told AFP.
“We had to evacuate an area of 30,000 people.”
Police said that authorities had transported some 16,000 people across land, with 3,000 evacuated by sea, and others fleeing by road or under their own transport after being told to leave the area.
German travel giant Tui said it was suspending all of its inbound passenger flights to Rhodes until Tuesday but would fly in empty planes to help evacuate tourists.
Spokesperson Linda Jonczyk told AFP that Tui had some 40,000 tourists in Rhodes, of which 7,800 are affected by the fires.
The low-cost British carrier Jet2 also said it had cancelled “all flights and holidays” to the island.
One German tourist told the Bild daily that they were “saved from the fire at the last moment” after returning from the beach on Saturday to a deserted hotel.
“We had embers flying around our heads and no help was in sight,” said 23-year-old Paul from Bielefeld.
“I had the feeling of being on my own, it was so hot and the smoke was already so thick we couldn’t have survived another ten minutes.” He said buses then arrived to evacuate the tourists, but some were so panicked they were trying to find boats to escape on from the beach.
Authorities have warned that the battle to contain the flames will take several days.
More than 260 firefighters, backed by 18 aircraft, were battling the fire on Sunday, with Croatia, France, Slovakia and Turkey having contributed equipment and personnel, officials said.
Last year Rhodes, which has a population of over 100,000, welcomed some 2.5 million tourist arrivals.
The Greek foreign ministry and embassies in Greece were setting up a station at the Rhodes airport to help tourists that have lost travel documents in the scramble to evacuate.
A large part of the island was without electricity as the public power utility shut down the local plant in the south for safety reasons.
“This is a special fire here because the heart of Rhodes and its environment is affected,” Efthymios Lekkas, a professor specialising in natural disasters told ERT TV on Sunday, warning of a severe impact to the island’s tourist industry.
“I just did a drive from Lindos to Gennadi,” he said. “All the big hotels have closed. I don’t think they will be able to operate this year because the surrounding area in each unit has been completely destroyed, and the environment is not inspiring for a holiday.”
The Greek presidency cancelled a national holiday planned for Monday “in view of the extraordinary conditions prevailing in the country due to the fires.” A separate wildfire broke out on Greece’s second-largest island, Evia, according to the fire services, although it was not near any homes.
Evia, situated off central Greece’s eastern coast, was devastated last year by some of the worst wildfires in the country’s history.
SCOTT MORRISON STRANDED IN GREECE HEATWAVE
Former Prime Minister Scott Morrison was made to wait 30 minutes for a ferry during Greece’s stiflingly hot weather before lugging his family’s suitcases aboard the packed boat.
According to a report in the Daily Mail, the tanned former prime minister was spotted waiting for the ferry to arrive on Sifnos, in the Cyclades islands, before travelling to Athens.
The ferry, which takes two-and-a-half hours to reach Athens, is a world away from Mr Morrison’s preferred mode of travel on his beloved Shark One – a $250 million specially-converted RAAF jet which he used to fly around the world in during his time as Australia’s prime minister.
Mr Morrison waited for the ferry with his wife Jenny and daughters Abbey and Lily at about 12.15pm local time as they continued the family’s European holiday.
The Morrisons sat in a packed area with other passengers and their luggage under the boiling sun for about half an hour as he waited to board.
According to onlookers, Mr Morrison looked in total holiday mode, sporting a navy blue polo, beige shorts, Ray-Ban sunglasses and had a white cap laying on top of his luggage while he listened to audio on his AirPods.
A passenger on board told the Daily Mail that Mr Morrison tried to keep a low profile.
“At first it was hard to recognise him as he kept his head down a lot,” the passenger told the outlet.
“He was very aware of the people around him, perhaps not wanting to be recognised as the islands are popular with Australian travellers.
“ScoMo had his AirPods in, not really saying much to his family. Mostly he had his head in his phone, perhaps to help keep his head down.”
The Morrisons reportedly got off in Athens to continue their family holiday as Europe continues to deal with an unprecedented heatwave.
In Greece, the heat has led authorities to close historic sites in the city, including the Acropolis.
NORTHERN HEMISPHERE HIT BY EXTREME TEMPERATURES
It comes as swathes of Europe baked in a heatwave trailed by wildfires and health warnings, as parts of Asia and the United States also suffered under extreme weather on Tuesday local time.
Firefighters battled blazes in parts of Greece and the Canary Islands and Spain issued heat alerts, while some children in Italy’s Sardinia were warned away from sports for safety reasons.
In the United States, the city of Phoenix broke a 49-year-old record with its 19th consecutive day of temperatures of 43C (110F) or higher, weather officials said.
“You can’t be in the street, it’s horrible,” said Lidia Rodriguez, 27, in Madrid.
From the Washington to Beijing, authorities have warned in recent days of the health dangers of the extreme heat, urging people to drink water and shelter from the sun.
Several local temperature records were broken in southern France, the weather service there said.
Meteo France said a record 29.5 C had been reached in the Alpine ski resort of Alpe d’Huez, which sits at an altitude of 1860 metres, while 40.6C had been recorded for the first time in Verdun in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
In a stark reminder of the effects of global warming, the UN’s World Meteorological Agency (WMO) said the trend of heatwaves “shows no signs of decreasing”.
“These events will continue to grow in intensity, and the world needs to prepare for more intense heatwaves,” John Nairn, a senior extreme heat adviser at the WMO told reporters in Geneva.
EUROPEAN COUNTRIES GRIPPED BY WILDFIRES, SCORCHING HEAT
Northwest of the Greek capital Athens, columns of smoke loomed over the forest of Dervenohoria, where one of several fires around the capital and beyond was still burning.
Still burning was a forest fire by the seaside resort of Loutraki, where the mayor said 1200 children had been evacuated Monday from holiday camps.
In the Canary Islands, some 400 firefighters battled a blaze that has ravaged 3500 hectares of forest and forced 4000 residents to evacuate, with authorities warning residents to wear face masks outside due to poor air quality.
Temperatures were unforgiving in Italy and in Spain, where three regions were put under hot weather red alerts.
The Italian islands of Sardinia and Sicily have been on watch to possibly surpass a continent-wide record of 48.8C (nearly 120F), recorded in Sicily in August 2021.
At Lanusei, near Sardinia’s eastern coast, a children’s summer camp was restricting beach visits to the early morning and forbidding sports, teacher Morgana Cucca told AFP.
In the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, pharmacist Teresa Angioni said patients were complaining of heat-related symptoms.
“They mainly buy magnesium and potassium supplements and ask us to measure their blood pressure, which is often low,” Angioni said.
Many throughout Italy sought escape by the sea, including outside Rome, where the midday heat hit 40C (104F).
“Certainly it’s better at the beach, you can at least get a little wind from the sea. It’s not even possible to remain in the city, too hot,” said Virginia Cesario, 30, at the Focene beach near the capital.
HEAT RECORD IN CHINA
In parts of Asia, record temperatures have triggered torrential rain.
Nearly 260,000 people were evacuated in southern China and Vietnam before a typhoon made landfall late Monday local time, bringing fierce winds and rain but weakening to a tropical storm by Tuesday.
The record-setting heat came as US climate envoy John Kerry met with Chinese officials in Beijing, as the world’s two largest polluters revive stalled diplomacy on reducing planet-warming emissions.
Speaking Tuesday at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi, Kerry called for “global leadership” on climate issues.
The heatwaves across Europe and the globe are “not one single phenomenon but several acting at the same time,” said Robert Vautard, director of France’s Pierre-Simon Laplace climate institute.
“But they are all strengthened by one factor: climate change.”
– with AFP
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