At least one person dead as fire triggers multiple evacuations across northern suburbs of capital
raged across the northern suburbs of Athens on Monday, leaving at least one person dead and triggering multiple evacuations as swirling winds hampered the efforts of hundreds of firefighters and dozens of water-dropping planes.
Fire Department spokesman Colonel Vassileios Vathrakogiannis said firefighters were no longer battling a single front but “many active localised blazes”, mostly around Marathon and Pendeli. Authorities said at least 18 people were injured, mostly due to smoke inhalation as the blaze reached outlying sections of a suburb. Greece’s National Observatory said that satellite images show the blaze has affected about 10,000 hectares .
The fire department said 685 firefighters, backed by 27 teams specially trained to tackle wildfires and including more than 80 armed forces personnel, were battling the flames. “The wind would go in one direction and then in the other. The smoke was suffocating. You couldn’t see. Your eyes teared up. You couldn’t breathe. You couldn’t see the house,” said Spyros Gorilas, a resident of the area of Dioni who hosed down his house with water to save it from the flames.“Even the helicopter that dropped water, you couldn’t see it. You could only hear it. Nothing else.”
Greece’s coast guard ordered all ferries going to and from the nearby port of Rafina, which serves mainly the Cycladic islands and Crete, to be diverted to the port of Lavrion due to the fire.
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