Firefighters continue Monday to fight the forest fires fanned by the heat wave in Greece after the unprecedented evacuation of thousands of tourists to the brutally shortened holidays in the islands of Rhodes and Corfu.
The forest fire led to the “preventive evacuation of 2,466 people” overnight from Sunday to Monday in Corfu, said Yannis Artopios, a spokesman for the fire department, stressing that there had been no homes or hotels destroyed so far.
A violent fire ravaging the also tourist island of Rhodes, in the south-east of the Aegean Sea, had led to the evacuation of more than 32,000 tourists on Saturday, “the largest operation (of this type) ever carried out in Greece”, according to the authorities.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on Monday that his country was “at war with […] fires “.
“We still have three difficult days ahead of us” due to high temperatures, he warned in a speech to parliament.
The national meteorological agency (EMY) indicated on Monday that the heat wave will increase on Tuesday and especially on Wednesday, when the temperature will reach 44°C.
Wednesday afternoon “thunderstorms in the center and west of the country are expected, before a drop of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius”, according to the EMY.
On Monday, above the island of Rhodes, the sky was covered with thick smoke and the hills covered with charred vegetation, according to images by an AFP videographer.
Kelly Squirrel, a British tourist, said police ordered people from her hotel in Rhodes to evacuate.
“Nightmarish”
“We had to walk tirelessly. We walked for about six hours in the heat,” she told AFP after arriving at Rhodes International Airport.
Here, among the tourists waiting to be repatriated, Daniel-Cladin Schimdt, a 42-year-old German, who came on vacation with his wife and their nine-year-old son on the Kiotari coast, south-east of Rhodes, experienced “a nightmarish evacuation”.
“We are exhausted and traumatized. I don’t think we really realize what happened,” he told AFP.
“We received a first message from the authorities on Saturday at 1:30 p.m., then the hotel alarm started ringing and we were evacuated to the beach,” he recalls. “There were thousands of people, the buses couldn’t pass, we had to walk for more than two hours […]. We couldn’t breathe, we covered our faces to move forward. It’s a miracle,” he says.
Kevin Sales, describes him, a “terrible” situation. “We had to lend a woman clothes from my wife because she had nothing to wear,” the English engineer told AFP.
From dawn on Monday morning, two helicopters and two water bombers resumed their operation to support firefighters on this Dodecanese island plagued by flames for the seventh consecutive day.
In Corfu, the authorities warned via an alert message on cell phones the inhabitants and holidaymakers of many small towns to leave “as a precaution their residence”.
The fire broke out on Sunday and continues to burn the forest in the north of this island in the Ionian Sea where some “62 firefighters supported by two helicopters and two water bombers” operate on Monday, according to the fire department.
Hit by one of the longest heat waves in recent decades with temperatures reaching locally more than 46 ° C on Sunday, Greece has been affected by forest fires since last week.
A hell “
Having just returned to Germany with other compatriot tourists, having fled the island of Rhodes, Lena Schwarz recounts what she describes as “hell”.
“To escape the flames we ran about ten kilometers on foot with all our luggage in a temperature of 42 ° C”, said in the night from Sunday to Monday to AFP this 38-year-old woman, in the hall of Hanover airport (north).
The Germans provide one of the largest contingents of tourists during the summer on the island of Rhodes, along with the British and the French.
Many German tourists describe with horror the circumstances of their departure during the weekend.
“The evacuation was very badly organized”, gets angry Oxana Neb, 50, when she gets off the plane.
Faced with the flames that were approaching their hotel, she remembers having “run (with others) to the beach” with the suitcases that she finally abandoned, before continuing on her way.
Arrived as best they could at Rhodes airport, the fleeing tourists found a chaotic situation.
In the departures hall of the international airport, in the northwest of the island, some were lying or even asleep on the floor, in the middle of the luggage, while others were grouped together in front of the flight display panel, AFP noted.
Rhodes, which had 2.5 million visitor arrivals in 2022, is one of Greece’s top resort destinations with numerous hotels all along its eastern shores.