Thousands more residents and tourists on three Greek islands were fleeing to safety Monday as scores of wildfires fueled by high winds and an unrelenting pattern of brutal heat waves consumed homes, hotels and businesses in the peak tourism season.
Authorities said some of the fires may have been started by arson.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis warned that his country has “more difficult days” ahead because of soaring temperatures. He estimated that 32,000 “precautionary evacuations” were carried out over the weekend on the islands of Rhodes, Corfu and Evia.
“We are at war against the fires,” Mitsotakis said.
On Rhodes, tourists are fleeing from the path of a weeklong fire that roared down from the mountains into several coastal areas. The Ministry of Climate Change and Civil Protection called it the nation’s largest wildfire evacuation in history. Evacuations spread to Corfu, where 2,000 were ordered out Monday as the fire raged in the northeast end of the island but had not reached residences, the local fire department reported.
Tourists were being crowded into emergency shelters in schools, airports and sports facilities. Many of the tourists are British, and Jet2 was among the U.K. airlines organizing repatriation flights to get them home.
“The risk of fire will be extreme in several areas of Greece today,” Fire Service spokesperson Vassilis Vathrakogiannis warned Monday.
Developments:
◾ Neighboring nations were aiding the effort to control the blazes. Turkey, Croatia and Egypt were providing planes and helicopters, Greek officials said.
◾ Temperatures on the southern Greek mainland soared as high as 113 degrees in recent days. An average of 50 new wildfires have ignited over the last 12 days, including 64 on Sunday, government spokesperson Pavlos Marinakis said.
◾ European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen contacted Mitsotakis late Sunday to offer assistance. She said climate change was partially to blame for the disaster.
Arson may have sparked blazes
Yiannis Artopios, a fire service spokesperson on Rhodes, told Greek television network Skai TV that authorities are currently questioning suspected arsonists.
“Fires are not sparked on their own,” he told Skai TV. “They are triggered by the human hand, be it intentionally or not. We currently have several people being questioned in connection with their probable involvement.”
In Corfu, the region’s deputy mayor for tourism and construction told the BBC the fires there were started by “a group of people.” Chariton Koutscouris said officials had a “suspicion” fires would be started this weekend.
Officials are said to have been warned on Friday by the fire department chief that someone who started two fires last week would start another.
“He was right,” Koutscouris said, adding that the apparent arsonists “get pleasure out of this with the pain of the other people.”
Locals pitch in to help stranded tourists
Thousands of tourists who were forced to evacuate from the hotels on Rhodes were temporarily sheltered in gyms and schools on the island, while many had already left Monday. There has also been a “huge wave” of solidarity and support from the inhabitants of the island, the Athens-Macedonia News Agency reported.
Around 8,000 tourists were staying in shelters in the villages of Rhodes with the assistance of hundreds of volunteers providing food, fruit, juices, water and other staples. Some locals opened their businesses and sent as many necessities as they could; supermarkets and mini-markets also opened to serve the stranded. Some residents even offered their own homes to host those in need, the agency reported.
‘Orange glow in the sky’: Tourists flee amid chaos
Acts of kindness were interspersed with less altruistic moments amid the fear and chaos of trying to escape the fires.
Ian Murison, a businessman from London on vacation in southern Rhodes with his wife and 12-year-old son, said there was only one bus waiting to take guests away from the flames approaching their hotel, which had a capacity for 1,200. So Murison and his family walked about 2 miles under a cloud of ash to a beach where they waited with thousands of others to be evacuated by bus or boat.
“You could see an orange glow in the sky … big balls of fire going into the sky,” Murison said, describing the jostling to jam into small boats arriving to take evacuees away. “It didn’t matter if you had children, adults were fighting to get on next. It was very, very stressful.”
Opposition party lays blame on government
Mitsotakis pledged that whatever burns down will be rebuilt and those affected will be compensated. The leader of the Socialist opposition party, Nikos Androulakis, told the Athens-Macedonia News Agency the government must take responsibility for the “immeasurable” disaster the nation faces.
“From the ‘all are under control,’ we reached the point where properties are lost and thousands of tourists (are told to) leave from the hotels, and the locals to evacuate their houses,” Androulakis said.
Wildfires and a dangerously hot airport tarmac in Italy
Wildfires have also been breaking out in southern Italy, where temperatures have hovered above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and past the 110 mark for weeks.
Firefighters tried Monday to control a wind-fed brush fire near Palermo in Sicily and also faced several other blazes on the Mediterranean island, including near the seaside tourist resort of Cefalu. Wildfires also ignited in Calabria, including in the Aspromonte mountains.
Another Italian island, Sardinia, was confronting a different set of weather-related issues. Flights from Milan, Paris and Amsterdam had to be diverted to other airports on the Mediterranean island Monday afternoon because the temperature on the tarmac at Olbia in the northeast was considered too dangerous at more than 116 degrees, RAI state TV reported.
Contributing: The Associated Press
