According to the Greek fire department, 18 dead have been discovered in a forested area in northern Greece that has been experiencing flames for the previous four days.
According to early indications, those who passed away might have been migrants. The area in the Dadia woodland is being tended to by a coroner and an investigation team.
Near the Turkish border, in northeastern Greece, the Evros region has been completely destroyed by fire.
It was necessary to evacuate a hospital in the city of Alexandroupolis.
Among those transported overnight to a vessel at the harbor were newborn infants and patients in intensive care.
The seaside city’s neighboring town had previously reported a fatality that was thought to have been the result of migration, and emergency services had sent mobile text messages to the region requesting that people evacuate.
To the north of Alexandroupolis is the Dadia national park, a sizable forested area where fires are believed to have spread quickly since Monday.
According to accounts, the 18 dead were discovered on Tuesday as the fire department examined the burned-out remnants of a structure outside the village of Avantas.
Given that there have been no complaints of Greek citizens going missing, the potential that the victims entered Greece illegally is being looked into, according to fire department spokesman Yiannis Artopios.
The seaside city’s neighboring town had previously reported a fatality that was thought to have been the result of migration, and emergency services had sent mobile text messages to the region requesting that people evacuate.
To the north of Alexandroupolis is the Dadia national park, a sizable forested area where fires are believed to have spread quickly since Monday.
According to accounts, the 18 dead were discovered on Tuesday as the fire department examined the burned-out remnants of a structure outside the village of Avantas.
Given that there have been no complaints of Greek citizens going missing, the potential that the victims entered Greece illegally is being looked into, according to fire department spokesman Yiannis Artopios.
Numerous nuns were reportedly trapped after a fire started close to a monastery near the Mt. Parnitha slopes a few kilometers to the north.
Additionally, a number of settlements on the central Greek islands of Boeotia and Evia have been evacuated.
While the operation to evacuate the site on the northeastern outskirts of Alexandroupolis was underway, flames were seen penetrating the hospital’s premises. A fleet of buses and ambulances was dispatched by Greek authorities to transport about 115 patients.
As many as 90 of the patients were carried to the Adamantios Korais, a ferry that had been commandeered to care for newborn babies and others in intensive care, while some were transferred to other hospitals in the city.
at Rhodope and further west along the shore at Kavala, several dozen kilometers to the north-west of the city, fires have also been raging.
A number of warehouses caught fire in an industrial neighborhood of Aspropyrgos, west of the city, and the sky clouded with noxious smoke close to the Attica Highway.
If helicopters had arrived in time, according to two Albanian workers who spoke to the BBC, they would have been able to put out the fire.
Tuesday at noon, a second sizable fire started in the town of Fyli, which is located on the other side of the highway. Residents were instructed to leave the area via a mobile phone message sent from the emergency line 112 thirty minutes later.
A few kilometers outside of Fyli, to the north-west of Athens, the famous Kleiston monastery of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary was also affected by the fire.
A emergency response team has been despatched to guide the 50 nuns who live at the monastery to safety, according to fire department officials.
According to Copernicus, a climate monitoring program run by the EU, Greece is one of several European nations that are currently at extremely high risk of wildfires.
On Monday following the mid-August holiday, France saw its warmest day ever, according to weather service Météo-France.
However, the record is based on Monday’s daily average temperature of 26.63C, which was measured by 30 meteorological stations across France. Temperatures on Monday spiked as high as 42.4C in the Drôme region of south-eastern France.
Due to the extreme heat, Switzerland’s “zero-degree isotherm”—the altitude at which temperatures drop below freezing—has reached a new record. The new upper limit, according to MeteoSwiss, is 5,298 meters (17,381 feet).
The Swiss Met office claims that the point is gradually rising, primarily due to human-caused global warming.
Since the 1970s, it claims, the height of the zero-degree isotherm has climbed rapidly, especially in the spring and summer.
