Turkish coastguards, Thursday continued the evacuation of hundreds of villagers from a burning power plant on Thursday even as Greek firefighters battled a major blaze near the ancient Olympic site as a record heatwave wreaked havoc across Europe’s southeast.
Africa Daily News, New York understands that the two regional rivals have been united this week in their fight against disasters that officials and experts link to increasingly frequent and intense weather events caused by climate change.
No fewer than eight people have been reported dead while a dozen others have been hospitalised across the southern coasts of Turkey since the wildfires erupted last week.
The blazes in Greece this week briefly cut off the main road leading to Athens and saw worrying fires break out in Olympia — the birthplace of the Olympic Games that is usually crowded with tourists — and on the island of Evia.
Read Also: Hundreds Evacuated As Wildfire Reaches Turkey’s Power Plant
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said on a visit to the archaeological ruins where the first Olympic Games were held that it was time to ‘conduct studies as quickly as possible to avoid further disasters’.
Prosecutors also launched a preliminary probe into reports that fires that blocked off Athens on Tuesday and saw air quality over the capital deteriorate sharply again Thursday were caused by an explosion at a public electric company plant.
But perhaps the biggest shock came when winds whipped up a flash fire that subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands of tonnes of coal.
However, a few older villagers in Oren refused to leave the disaster-hit region even while thousands of others were shuttled out by car or boats racing along the Aegean Sea.
‘Where do you want us to go at our age?’ asked 79-year-old Hulusi Kinic.
‘We live here. This is our home. Our last solution was to throw ourselves in the sea (if there was an explosion), but thank God that did not happen.’
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
