ATHENS – As Greece assesses a wildfire that spread 25 miles in a day from the village of Varnavas northeast of the capital into a neighborhood of Athens, photos from space showed towns nearly consumed and widespread devastation.

Flames as high as 80 feet raced at speeds of 15 miles per hour through woodlands and populated areas, destroying homes and vehicles and killing one woman, a factory worker who tried to find a safe spot in a bathroom.

It was the first time such an extensive blaze got into a neighborhood of Athens, shocking residents who thought the almost annual summer fires just burn forest and woodlands although they’ve killed scores of people at times.

A July 23, 2018 fire that began with a man burning brush – he was prosecuted but not jailed and officials also convicted were spared going to prison – killed 104 people and nearly wiped out the seaside village of Mati.

This time the speed of the fire and how it reached the capital was surprising although Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis praised a “superhuman effort” by firefighters to finally bring it under control.

But it burned an area twice the size of Manhattan and led to some 40 homes being declared uninhabitable and dozens of residences and businesses lost in the flames although only 10 percent of the are was forest land.

In a review of the damage, CNN said that “satellite images reveal the immense scale of damage the fire caused and show just how terrifyingly close the flames came to consuming whole towns and villages.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/16/climate/greece-wildfires-athens-photos-climate-intl/index.html

Some places were completely surrounded by flames, which reached up to 80 feet high, Reuters reported, citing local fire authorities and images of Varnavas show the town ringed by black, scorched earth.

“The undulating landscape that surrounds it was swiftly consumed by flames as the fire spread astonishingly quickly due to a mix of high temperatures, strong winds and land left parched by a very hot, dry summer,” the report said.

Vothonas, a village close to Varnavas, was also shown encircled by black, ashy landscape, almost entirely torched by a ring of fire that surrounded it as more than 700 firefighters and water-dropping planes and helicopters battled it.

The fire raced right to the outskirts of Athens, a city of 3 million people, coming within miles of the busy, tourist-filled center and reached the northern neighborhood of Vrilissia, the report added, where the woman was found dead.

Summer fires are common in Greece and in the last few years have been especially destructive, burning almost half of the country’s second-biggest island of Evia, and Climate change largely ignored by governments around the world have largely been blamed but Greece has been enduring several years of record heat waves in the summer and high winds that whip the fires.