Torrential rains battered Greece and Turkey on Monday 4 and Tuesday 5 September, leaving at least five people dead and several missing.
Hard hit by many devastating fires this summer, including the one that has ravaged Dadia National Park in Evros (north) for the past two weeks, Greece has been experiencing torrential rains since Monday, September 4. “Thunderstorms and heavy rain fell on Tuesday, especially in Volos, capital of the department of Magnesia”, in the center of the country, where a man was found dead, fire department spokesman Yannis Artopios told AFP. ERT public television.
According to initial information, one person was swept away by a torrent, while three others, including a shepherd in the village of Agios Georgios, located in the same region, are missing. According to the Greek coast guard, a woman who was canoeing at sea in the region of Chalkidiki, further north, is also wanted.
The department of Magnesia and the islands near Sporades, in the center of the country, are classified as red alert, according to the civil protection services. “This is an extreme phenomenon,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a meeting Tuesday with Hellenic President Katerina Sakellaropolou. Rainfall in Volos reached 200 millimeters and 600 millimeters in the nearby village of Zagora, located at the foot of Mount Pelion, according to the Hellenic National Meteorological Service (EMY).
A historic level of precipitation
“The amount of water that fell in twenty-four hours is the usual rain set for the whole autumn,” meteorologist Panayotis Giannopoulos told ERT. “According to meteorologists, this is the most extreme phenomenon in terms of the amount of water that has fallen in the space of twenty-four hours since Greece has had records on the subject,” said during a press conference with the Minister of Civil Protection, Vassilis Kikilias.
“In Zagora, on Mount Pelion, the rain reached 645 mm until 3 p.m. (…) and after a brief lull, the rains are expected to be heavy again early tomorrow morning,” he added. . The basement of the Volos hospital, as well as the streets of the city, were flooded and firefighters “are pumping out the water”, according to Yannis Artopios.
Police have banned travel to Volos, some villages in Pelion and the nearby island of Skiathos where, due to flooding. “Planes cannot approach the airport,” Savvas Karayannis, head of communications at Fraport, the German company that manages regional airports in Greece, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). “Weather conditions are extreme and there are currently many delays in airport connections,” he said.
Public transport is at a standstill until further notice in the city of Volos and the surrounding area and power and water cuts have been reported to the authorities. Traffic to southern Pelion is halted after a bridge collapses.
The island of Euboea and the department of Elis also affected
On Monday evening, thunderstorms also hit the island of Euboea, located north of Athens, where they caused landslides, as well as the district of Elis, in the Peloponnese (southwest ), where crops were damaged, according to local media.
On the front lines of the massive Dadia Forest fire, which has been burning since August 19, Mr. Artopios told Agence France-Presse that “the fire [was] under control and [that] no fire has ‘[was] active’. “Firefighters remain on site to monitor the situation,” he said.
Described as a “mega-fire” by experts, the Dadia forest fire, an area protected by the European Natura 2000 network, has so far destroyed more than 81,000 hectares, almost half of the hectares affected by the fires since the beginning of summer in Greece, according to the European observatory Copernicus. These fires have killed at least 26 people this year and ravaged at least 150,000 hectares.
The streets of Istanbul transformed into torrents
In Turkey, also affected by torrential rains, four people died in flash floods on Tuesday. Two people have lost their lives in Istanbul streets turned into raging rivers, authorities say. The overnight storm partially flooded a subway station and forced the evacuation of dozens of people from a municipal library, according to media reports.
Footage broadcast on TV and social media showed streams sweeping past cars and market stalls. The rains follow a particularly dry summer that saw water reservoirs in this city of 16 million people fall to their lowest level in nine years.
Turkish emergency services also deplored two dead and four missing in floods that affected the town of Kirklareli, in the north-west of the country.
It is a large part of the Mediterranean basin which has been affected for a few days by torrential rains. In Spain, they left three dead and three missing.