Greece blaze the ‘largest wildfire recorded in EU’

A forest blaze in Greece is “the largest wildfire ever recorded in the EU” and the bloc is mobilising nearly half its firefighting air wing to tackle it, a European Commission spokesman said yesterday.
Eleven planes and one helicopter from the EU fleet have been sent to help Greece counter the fire north of the city of Alexandroupoli, along with 407 firefighters, spokesman Balazs Ujvari said.
The EU’s civil protection service said the fire has burnt over 810sq km— an area bigger than New York City.
“This wildfire is the largest in the EU since 2000, when the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) began recording data,” the service said.
Greece’s fire service told AFP that the blaze was “still out of control” in the northeast region’s Dadia National Park, a major sanctuary for birds of prey.
Since it began on August 19, the blaze has claimed the lives of 20 people, 18 of them migrants whose bodies were found in a region that is often used as an entry point from neighbouring Turkiye.
Fuelled by gale force winds and hot weather, the fire that began near the city of Alexandroupolis quickly spread across the Evros region. It turned swathes of lush greenery into scorched earth and destroyed homes and livelihoods.
Aircraft and hundreds of firefighters on the ground, including from Serbia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Albania, were battling the flames, the fire brigade said.
“We are trying to defend the rest of the unaffected area before the front line of the fire comes,” said Jiri Nemcik, commander of the Czech team. “The development of the fire is very dynamic so it’s very dangerous.”
Satellite images highlight the extent of the destruction in the area, with swathes of forest virtually flattened and lush pine trees turned into blackened, skeletal bark.
Panagiota Maragou, head of conservation at the Greece division of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), said at least 30% of the National Park of Dadia-Lefkimi-Soufli Forest had been lost to flames.
Thanks to its high biodiversity, the national park was “one of the most important protected areas in Greece and also in Europe, perhaps also on an international scale”, she said.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis chaired a meeting yesterday on the fires that have ravaged Greece, touching on preventative measures among other issues, a statement from his office said.
Environmentalists have long accused Greece of spending more funds on extinguishing fires than on prevention.
“We’ve seen in the case of Dadia and in the case of the Evros fire in general ..., one of the biggest fires in Europe, that a system that relies exclusively on suppression of fires is not working,” Maragou said.
Summer wildfires are common in Greece but the government says extreme weather conditions which scientists link to climate change have made them worse this year. Greece’s deadliest fire on record killed 104 people outside Athens in 2018.