Greece struggles to control fatal wildfires, including ‘EU’s largest on record’
- The wildfire in the Alexandroupolis region has combined with smaller fires to create a massive inferno consuming homes and vast tracts of forest
- As hundreds of square kilometres burn, arsonists are being blamed for some blazes and other nations are sending firefighters to help
Firefighters struggled on Thursday against strong winds and hot, dry conditions to tame multiple wildfires ravaging Greece, including one in the country’s northeast that officials say is the largest ever recorded in the European Union.
The wildfires have left 20 people dead over the last week. Eighteen of those, including two boys aged between 10 and 15, are believed to be migrants who crossed the nearby border with Turkey.
Their bodies were found by firefighters near a shack in a burnt forest area near the city of Alexandroupolis in northeastern Greece. Sixty firefighters have been injured, fire department spokesman Ioannis Artopios said.
The wildfire in the Alexandroupolis region, burning for a sixth day, combined with smaller fires to create a massive inferno that has consumed homes and vast tracts of forest and triggered multiple evacuations of villages and of the city’s hospital.
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With more than 730 square kilometres (282 square miles) burned, the combined blazes “are now the largest wildfires on record the EU has faced”, the European Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarcic said on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.