By Louisa Gouliamaki, Vania Turner and Angelos Tsatsis
PSATHA, Greece, Aug 3 (Reuters) – Hundreds of Greek firefighters battled a wildfire northwest of Athens for a fourth day on Monday after strong and erratic winds helped it devastate homes, pine forests and thousands of hectares of farmland, forcing evacuations by land and sea.
Two crew on a firefighting helicopter crashed and died on Sunday near the seaside community of Psatha, about 40 km (25 miles) from Athens, after a mid-air brush with a second helicopter, whose two crew survived.
More than 400 firefighters and 21 aircraft were deployed near the communities of Kandili and Agia Skepi on Monday as plumes of thick black smoke and red flames engulfed lush pine forests.
Heavy machinery was being used to carve fire breaks to prevent the wildfire reaching homes, a fire brigade official said.
Europe has been ravaged by wildfires this summer after a period of record-breaking heatwaves and little rain — conditions that scientists say have been exacerbated by a fast-changing climate. France and Spain have been particularly hard hit, although huge blazes there abated over the weekend, providing some respite.
FAULTY POWER LINES
Greece’s fire season had been relatively mild by local standards. Then, last week, three firefighters were killed in two separate incidents in Crete and on the Peloponnese on July 29.
Authorities are trying to ascertain the cause of the mid-air helicopter crash, which occurred at low altitude.
The area near Psatha has experienced wildfires before. Locals have complained that, while vegetation has been cleared around houses, more needs to be done to build and maintain fire breaks in the forests.
Preliminary investigation suggests that a fire that broke out in the nearby area of Boeotia last week and travelled 25 km (15 miles) was caused by sparks from vibrating conductors on a private power line transmitting electricity from wind turbines, the fire brigade said.
An electrical engineer and a contractor have been arrested and are being investigated for arson.
Faulty power lines have been the leading cause of major wildfires in Greece in recent years, ahead of arson and negligence.
WIND-WHIPPED FIRES
Deputy Climate Crisis Minister Kostas Katsafados told public broadcaster ERT that strong and erratic winds over the past few days had prevented water bombers drawing up seawater, leaving ground forces battling the blazes on their own.
Dense undergrowth from a relatively wet winter in many western and southern European nations, which was then baked in intense heatwaves in May, June and July, has turned many areas into a tinderbox.
In the Netherlands, fire crews were deployed to contain a wildfire in a nature reserve in the south of the country, and evacuated a nearby camping site.
Italy was bracing for another week of extreme heat while the regional government in the northwestern region of Piedmont declared a regional state of emergency due to the ongoing water shortage and wildfires affecting the region.
Vienna recorded a new record temperature of 40.1 degrees Celsius on Monday, beating its previous record of 40.0 C set just six days earlier, the national weather service Geosphere Austria said.
HOMES BURN, RESOURCES OVERSTRETCHED
The fast-moving flames destroyed lush forests and caused extensive damage to olive trees just months before harvest, an eagerly anticipated annual ritual in many Greek households.
“It’s an awful feeling, when you build something with so much effort, and when money is not easy to find,” Anastasia Hatzoglou said.
She said her stone-built home suffered extensive damage, and her olive trees burned.
“It was so much effort, and when you put care into your property, your land, the oil that you make every year — it’s not great,” she told Reuters.
Days of operations have overstretched a thinly staffed and ageing fire service, the legacy of a hiring freeze during Greece’s 2009-2018 debt crisis, Nikos Lavranos, head of the Federation of Unions of Fire Service Employees, said.
“A firefighter who is useful to fellow citizens and society is a rested firefighter, not an exhausted one,” he added.
(Additional reporting by Angeliki Koutantou, Renee Maltezou and Lefteris Papadimas in Athens, Charlotte Van Campenhout in Amsterdam, Giselda Vagnoni and Cristina Carlevaro in Rome, Francois Murphy in Vienna, writing by Angeliki Koutantou; additional writing by Michele Kambas; editing by Susan Fenton, Kevin Liffey and Andrew Heavens)
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