2023-09-09 14:24:00
Firefighters, supported by the army, continue on Saturday in Greece to help hundreds of residents of villages blocked by floods in Thessaly, which have so far killed ten people, according to the authorities.
‘More than 2,850 people have been rescued since the start of the bad weather,’ fire spokesperson Yannis Artopios said on the Mega television channel.
‘There are still many people in the villages around Karditsa, Palamas and around Trikala. They are not missing, they are trapped, the official number of missing is currently six,’ he said.
‘It was really hell!’, confides Eleni Patouli, 54, resident of the village of Palamas.
Thousands of hectares of crops have been destroyed and many livestock have perished in this primordial plain for the agricultural sector in Greece.
‘We are destroyed. More than 1,500 pigs drowned. 70% of our farm has suffered damage,’ laments Thomas Kasos, a 58-year-old breeder.
Visiting the region on Friday, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis promised rapid compensation while reiterating that this is ‘an unprecedented natural disaster’.
But the situation also remains worrying near Larissa, a few kilometers to the east.
‘We are experiencing great difficulties with the Pinios river, near the town of Larissa, which has overflowed and reached 2.5 meters high in the suburbs of Larissa,’ he added.
Non-drinkable water
Friday evening, civil protection sent a message to evacuate a district of the city threatened by rising waters.
In Volos, water supply remains problematic, with pumping stations and much of the water supply network having been destroyed during the storm.
‘The water is not drinkable’, reminded the Greek Ministry of Health, issuing a series of recommendations to citizens.
‘Cases of gastroenteritis have appeared and this is likely to increase if residents do not have enough water! The authorities must distribute at least 2 liters of drinking water to everyone, insisted Elena Riza, professor of epidemiology at the Medical University of Athens on the public television channel Ert.
Traffic also remained difficult on Saturday, with the highway between Thessaloniki, the country’s second city, and Athens being cut in several places.
Described by experts as an ‘extreme phenomenon in terms of the quantity of water falling in the space of 24 hours’, the storm called ‘Daniel’ hit Magnesia on Monday and Tuesday, in particular its capital, the port city of Volos and the villages of Mount Pelion, before reaching localities around Karditsa and Trikala on Wednesday.
These bad weather follow devastating forest fires this summer in Greece, which left at least 26 dead.
With global warming, the atmosphere contains more water vapor (around 7% for each additional degree), increasing the risks of heavy precipitation events which, combined with other factors such as urbanization, lead to floods.
In Turkey and Bulgaria, two countries bordering Greece, the torrential rains of recent days have caused a total of 12 deaths.
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