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Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
ATHENS – As Greece required municipalities and homeowners to clear areas of combustible materials to prevent fires, investigators said a blaze that raced 25 miles in one day to reach the outskirts of Athens likely was caused by a faulty power cable.
Sources who are probing what happened, but not named, told Reuters signs point to the cable in the town of Varnavas, northeast of the capital, a 76-year-old man saying it was loose and attached to a wooden electricity pillar outside his house.
The fire killed a factory worker in a bathroom in an Athens neighborhood, where the blaze reached, whipped by high winds and destroyed 10,000 hectares (24,711 acres) of area, about twice the size of Manhattan, torching homes and cars.
The news agency said that authorities questioned Varnavas residents and got testimony from the elderly man about the cable and pole but it wasn’t said if it was supposed to be maintained by the state power company.
That scenario was the leading one in the probe, which should be concluded over the coming months, an official with knowledge of the investigation said. Arson was also being considered, the report added.
A fire brigade official who declined to be named said an area close to the electricity pole had been determined as the starting point of the blaze that required more than 700 firefighters aided by water-dropping aircraft to extinguish.
Greece’s power network operator HEDNO, said it had found no evidence of a malfunction. “We have no indication that anything wrong such as a short-circuit happened,” an official at HEDNO told Reuters, adding that only the relevant authorities were responsible for determining the fire’s cause.
Wildfires are common in Greece in the summer, many in the past believed deliberately set to clear land for development, and other causes have been short circuits, natural causes or burning brush, which was the case in 2018 that led to a conflagration killed 104 people and nearly wiped out the seaside village of Mati.
Greece had more than 8,000 forest fires in 2023 that killed 28 people and injured 75, the government attributing them largely to climate change but worsened by longer and earlier heatwaves and drought.
Local media cited residents who had heard explosions before the fire broke out. Others said there were initially two fires. “The fire started very far from here, probably from a power line and in no time it burned everything,” 78-year old Varnavas resident Giannis Tsiminis told Reuters.
