Fast-moving wildfires raced near Athens fueled by dry, hot weather and extreme winds.
ROME >> Huge wildfires in Greece spread by powerful winds have killed at least 74 people and injured scores more, authorities said Tuesday, as the blazes ravaged several areas on the outskirts of the country’s capital.
Greece’s deadliest wildfires in more than a decade sent flecks of ash and orange-gray plumes over Athens and prompted people to flee from coastal spots popular with summer vacationers. Some rushed to the beaches. Others jumped into cars and battled clogged roadways. The fires ripped through pine forests and turned homes into partially melted shells.
Evangelos Bournous, mayor of hard-hit port town of Rafina, said at least 60 people were dead and that the death toll was expected to rise, Reuters news agency reported. More than 100 people have been injured in the blazes, officials said.
The death toll, which stood at 24 early Tuesday, rose sharply when authorities found 26 additional victims, some of them youths, near the top of a cliff that overlooks a beach, according to news reports. The bodies were huddled tightly together, some of them hugging, and were presumed to be families, the head of Greece’s Red Cross told Skai television, according to the Associated Press.
The government declared an emergency in the worsthit area, as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras returned early from a trip to Bosnia so that he could meet with fire chiefs and government officials.
Greece — already using its full fleet of water-dropping planes, according to local media — is requesting international help to handle the fires. Several countries, including Cyprus and
Spain, have so far offered assistance.
“We are dealing with something completely asymmetric,” Tsipras said, according to Reuters.
“Greece is going through an unspeakable tragedy,” the prime minister said in a televised address. He said the government is declaring “three days of national mourning in the memory of those who perished.”
Greece has had a dry and hot summer. But, according to Reuters, Tsipras and other Greek officials “have expressed misgivings” that several fires broke out at once. The fires spread quickly Monday as wind speeds touched 50 miles per hour.
“We express our deepest sympathies to the families and friends of the victims of
the fires in Attica,” the U.S. Embassy in Athens said on Twitter, referring to the region that encompasses the capital.
Officials said the fires spread unpredictably and took people by surprise. The wildfires — one located about 30 miles west of Athens and the other northeast of the capital near Rafina — started Monday. A government spokesman said in a briefing Monday night, according to CNN, that the combination of “intense winds” and “multiple parallel fronts” was creating difficulty for firefighters.
On Monday, authorities urged the evacuation of vacation homes and children’s summer camps. As people rushed toward beaches and ports to escape the flames,
more than 700 were evacuated by the coast guard, the AP reported.
“We were unlucky,” Bournous, the Rafina mayor, told the news agency. “The wind changed, and it came at us with such force that it razed the coastal area in minutes.”
Many of the victims had been trapped in the seaside resort of Mati, some 25 miles northeast of Athens, and died either in their homes or their cars while trying to flee.
Bournous said more than 1,000 homes have been completely burned, as have several hundred cars.
The fires are the worst in Greece since 2007, when blazes broke out in several areas, including the Peloponnese peninsula, killing more than 60 people.