Thousands evacuated from Corfu
AUTHORITIES evacuated nearly 2 500 people from the Greek island of Corfu yesterday, as the heat-battered nation was “at war” with several wildfires.
Tens of thousands of people have already fled blazes on the island of Rhodes, with many tourists scrambling to get home on evacuation flights.
About 2 400 visitors and locals were evacuated from Corfu from Sunday into yesterday, a fire service spokesperson said, adding that the departures were a precaution.
“We are at war and are exclusively geared towards the fire front,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told parliament, 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 UK, said police had ordered people from her hotel on Rhodes to evacuate. “We had to keep walking,” she said at the international airport. “So we walked for about six hours in the heat.”
Rhodes, which counted 2.5 million visitor arrivals last year, is one of Greece’s leading holiday destinations.
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.
About 30 000 people fled the flames on Rhodes at the weekend, the country’s largest wildfire evacuation.
Police said 16 000 people had been transported on land and 3 000 evacuated 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 nineyear-old son. “There were thousands of people; the buses couldn’t pass; we had to walk for more than two hours,” he said 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, there were groups of tourists sleeping on the floor, surrounded by luggage.
Several travel companies have halted their inbound tourist flights to Rhodes, and have been helping to ferry foreigners home.
“We ran 10km with all our luggage to escape the flames”, while the temperature was 42°C, said German tourist Lena Schwarz, after arriving at Hanover airport overnight Sunday into yesterday. The 38-year-old said 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. Neb joined other guests running to the beach, eventually abandoning her suitcases on the way.
Crews have been battling the flames in parts of Greece for about a week, and firefighters were, from dawn yesterday, using aircraft to try to douse the flames on Rhodes.
According to the authorities, many regions were under extreme risk of forest fires yesterday, but no towns were directly threatened by flames, the fire service said.