Greece is dealing with multiple forest fires, the smoke of which partially envelops Athens this Sunday, August 11, amid warnings of extreme weather conditions. Due to a persistent drought for several years, the country is hit by uncontrollable fires every summer.
Greece is on fire again. This Sunday, August 11, fires broke out on an unprecedented scale, forcing the midnight evacuation of the historic town of Marathonlocated 40 km northeast of Athens. More than 7,000 residents were forced to rush out of their homes, while five other communities were evacuated at first light.
The day before, the Greek Minister of Civil Protection issued a warning until August 15. With scorching temperatures, strong winds and a drought affecting half the country for months, fires were inevitable. These fires are rekindling memories of a devastating summer marked by a stubborn drought that has continued to plague the country ever since.
“It has rained very little for almost three years”
So the summer of 2023 lasted until October. But the current drought is mainly explained by the hottest winter ever recorded by the Greek meteorological services since 1960. The year was also notably short of rain, despite deadly floods that ravaged the central agricultural region of Thessaly in September last year. Today, the water tables of the Greek islands are dry. “In the Cyclades and southern Crete, the situation is even more critical because there has been very little rain for almost three years,” explains Kostas Lagouvardos, director of research at the Athens Observatory. The world.
This mild winter was followed by a spring marked by abnormally high temperatures. “May was the eleventh month in a row with temperatures above seasonal norms, even in northern Greece,” Kostas Lagouvardos points out. In particular, June was the hottest month since 1960, according to official data. By April, Crete was already affected by fires, well before the official opening of the fire season. On April 6, in just twelve hours, no fewer than 71 fires broke out in agricultural and forestry areas across the country.
1.5°C warmer in Greece over 30 years
A record year-round drought has only increased the risk of a devastating wildfire this summer. 200 km west of Athens, the artificial lake Mornos, the main water reservoir in Attica, the region around the capital, has seen its reserves drop by 30% in a year, according to data from the regional public operator Eydap. Total reserves for Attica fell by 24% over the same period. Despite an ongoing investment of 750 million euros, Nikitas Mylopoulos, a professor of water resources management at the University of Thessaly, strongly criticizes AFP for the “failed management of water in Greece, where the hydraulic infrastructures are severely flawed” and “waste frequent when irrigating land” by farmers.
In the last thirty years, temperatures have risen by an average of 1.5°C in the country. According to the European Drought Observatory, which is based on the use of satellite images from the Copernicus programme, southern Crete is in a state of alert, as are other regions of the Mediterranean, notably Sicily in Italy and Catalonia in Spain. Last month, North Macedonia declared a state of emergency due to dozens of fires ravaging the country. Albania, for its part, had to resort to the EU's civil protection mechanism to put out the fires in the south of the country, near the border with Greece.