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New York Times
03-07-2025
- Climate
- New York Times
Tourists Evacuated as Firefighters Battle Crete Blaze
Hundreds of people, many of them tourists, were evacuated from their homes and hotels on the Greek island of Crete on Thursday as firefighters struggled to control a wildfire in arid conditions. Greece, like much of southern Europe, is experiencing a heat wave that has created the hot and dry conditions that exacerbate wildfires. More than 200 firefighters battled the blaze on several fronts, but their work was made more difficult by gale-force winds and rugged mountain terrain, Vassilis Vathrakoyiannis, Greece's fire service spokesman, said during a news conference. As the fire spread overnight and into Thursday morning, the island's authorities, including members of the coast guard, hustled to evacuate 1,500 people. Most of them, about 1,200, were tourists, said Manolis Frangoulis, the mayor of Ierapetra, a city on the southwest coast of the island. There were no reports of injuries or deaths. 'It was like hell on earth,' the mayor said. 'There were thousands of patches of fire, springing up everywhere, each time the wind blew and threw blazing pine cones this way and that.'
New York Times
26-06-2025
- New York Times
Housekeeper Arrested Over Wildfire That Scorched Greek Island
A 35-year-old housekeeper was arrested in Greece on Tuesday in connection with devastating wildfires that tore across the island of Chios this week, officials said. 'She'd been smoking,' Vassilis Vathrakoyiannis, the spokesman of the Hellenic Fire Service said of the housekeeper, who he said was a Georgian woman. Five blazes, the first of which broke out on Sunday, collectively consumed more than 11,000 acres of the island. A news release from the fire service said a foreign woman had been arrested on the north of the island, near where the last of the fires sprang up on Monday. The blazes razed huge swaths of the island's forestland, forcing the evacuation of more than a dozen villages. Firefighters from across the country were rushed to the island on planes and ferries to battle the blaze; more than 400 were eventually deployed. As Greece approaches its summer wildfire season, the Chios fire was a reminder of a grim reality for the nation, where furious wildfires have become a regular part of life, especially as climate change has made the country hotter and drier. Chios is one of the largest islands in the Aegean Sea, known for resin-producing mastic trees which hardly grow anywhere else in the world. Used for things like pharmaceuticals, beauty products and liquor, the trees are a critical driver for the local economy, and a draw for tourists. While not as popular as some other Greek islands, Chios sees an influx of visitors during the summer months, also the height of wildfire season. The trees have been periodically threatened by wildfires on the island, including in 2012, when a wildfire destroyed more than half of the island's mastic tree population, causing a global shortage of the valuable resin. The fires this week damaged some of the island's trees, according to local media, but did not burn the southern part of the island, where the majority of the mastic trees grow. Three of the blazes started on Sunday; another two began on Monday amid sweltering, windy conditions. Firefighters had contained most of the fires by Thursday, as winds calmed. Soon after the fires began spreading on Sunday, fire officials deployed investigators from the fire service's Directorate for Combating Arson Crimes. The scope of the fires, and their presence in multiple, unconnected areas of the island, suggested to officials that they did not begin naturally. 'We will not hide behind words: When fires break out simultaneously in such scattered locations, we must speak of suspicious activity,' said Giannis Kefalogiannis, the country's Minister for Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, in a Greek-language statement on Monday. Niki Kitsantonis and Matina Stevis-Gridneff contributed reporting.
