$ USD
General News
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 – While Greece has mostly escaped the horrors of deadly 2023 wildfires – there were still hundreds since May – a rampaging blaze pushed by high winds outside Athens was again burning Mount Penteli and consuming houses and cars.
There were also evacuations of hospitals and at least 11 towns and villages, authorities said, with a continuing heat wave, no rain and gale-force winds making the fire spread faster than firefighters could handle.
Even the use of water-dropping planes and helicopters and a firefighting force beefed up after the 2023 blazes and those a year before weren’t able to cope with the speed of the spread, the phenomenon worsened by climate change.
More than 560 firefighters backed by volunteers, 17 water bombing planes and 15 helicopters battled the conflagration that broke out in the afternoon of Aug. 11 near Varnavas, some 35 kilometers (21.7 miles) northeast of the capital and just above Marathon, near where wildfires in 2018 killed 104 people.
By the morning of Aug. 12 the fire spread south and was burning on several fronts including the village of Grammatiko, the seaside municipality of Nea Makri, and Mount Penteli, said Reuters, just north of Athens, which has repeatedly burned.
Strong winds were constantly changing the flames’ direction. “Despite a hard battle and the superhuman efforts overnight, the fire spread very fast and has reached Mount Penteli,” a fire brigade official told the news agency.
The blaze, with flames as high as 25 meters (82 feet), spread “like lightning” due to gale-force winds, fire brigade spokesperson Vassilis Vathrakogiannis said as squadrons of firefighters tried to beat it down.
Thick clouds of smoke darkened the sky over Athens the night of Aug. 11 and within hours the flames were burning near the residential suburb of Dionysos about 23 kilometers (14 miles) northeast of the city center, and nearby areas.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis rushed back to Athens from a weekend break on the island of Crete to oversee the response to the blaze, a government official said, unlike the chaotic response in 2018 by the then ruling Radical Left SYRIZA.
The fire broke out just after Climate Crisis and Civil Protection Minister Vassilis Kikilias warned of the dangers of the combination of the heatwave, winds, climate change and conditions ripe for forest fires.
“Half of Greece will be in the red,” he said the day before the blaze broke out, with temperatures in some parts of the country near 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and another week of temperatures near 100 every day coming.
Kikilias said the fire was “extremely dangerous,” and that firefighting forces were struggling in “dramatic conditions” with a drought turning forests and lands into tinderboxes exploding into flames.
“Right now the battle is being waged on two fronts, one in the area of Kallitechnoupolis and the other in Grammatikos … we will continue with all our might until it is brought under control and the last front is put out,” he said.
“Our thoughts are with the residents of Eastern Attica who are being tested, as well as with the firefighting forces and the volunteers who are battling the blaze,” stated opposition PASOK-Movement for Change leader Nikos Androulakis.
“What matters now is to contain the fire but the next day a national preventive plan for the climate crisis is imperative. Every summer we lose the few remaining green areas, properties are destroyed and lives are in danger,” he added.
