Crete wildfire kills three firefighters, 8,000 flee
The front south of Rethymno stretched past 15 kilometres, 29 people were pulled off the shoreline by boat, and two of the dead were buried on Thursday.
Greece lost three firefighters in a single day, and the Crete wildfire burning south of Rethymno pushed roughly 8,000 people out of their homes and off the beaches. The stretch of coast now closed off is the one Serbian holidaymakers pick precisely because it sits far from the big resorts, and it emptied at the peak of the season.
The fire started on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 29, near the villages of Nea Krya Vrysi and Sachtouria, in the municipality of Agios Vasilios. That same afternoon two firefighters died after their engine was caught in dense smoke and the crew lost its bearings.
They were Pantelis Diamantakis, 25, a seasonal firefighter, and Emmanouil Manolis Stratidakis, 58, on a five-year contract. Both came from the Amari area, the same part of the island where they were working. Their funerals were held on Thursday, July 30.
The third death came on the Peloponnese. The 27-year-old deputy chief of the Gytheio fire station was found unconscious at around 8:44 p.m. in the Ageranos area of Laconia, at a spot where no active front was burning at the time, and died in hospital in Sparta.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis paid tribute to the three men and offered condolences over their deaths, according to the Athens outlet ProtoThema. Maria Lioni, deputy regional governor of Rethymno, described the past 24 hours as “a night like a nightmare and a day like a nightmare”.
How many people were moved, and how
By Thursday morning the active front near Rethymno ran longer than 15 kilometres. Six alerts went out through the 112 emergency system, and around 8,000 residents and visitors were moved. About 700 of them were put up in the indoor sports hall at Phaistos.
The evacuated settlements were:
- Nea Krya Vrysi, Sachtouria and Melambes
- Kryopetra, Agios Pavlos and Agios Georgios
- Orne, Agia Galini and Ligres
- Agia Paraskevi and Triopetra
Part of the coast was cut off by land. Coast guard, rescue and private boats took 29 people off the shoreline at Agios Pavlos, a scene Greece has repeated on Rhodes and in Attica over recent summers.
Why the aircraft stayed on the ground
Gusts reached 10 to 11 on the Beaufort scale. Weather stations logged more than 100 kilometres per hour, and 125 kilometres per hour on Thursday morning. Two helicopters were grounded, which left the work to the crews on the slope.
There were 224 firefighters deployed, along with 11 forest fire units, 53 vehicles and seven ambulances. Without air support a front moving at wind speed is not stopped so much as followed, and villages are cleared before it arrives. That is why the evacuation figure looks so large against the number of houses in those hamlets.
Crete was not the only island burning
The same wind was working elsewhere. On Lesbos, near Plomari, more than 1,000 stremmas burned, roughly 100 hectares, with 92 firefighters committed. A separate fire near Sitia, in eastern Crete, was brought under control at 2:35 p.m. on Thursday. Paros, Messinia and Laconia also had active fires.
We reported earlier this week on the fires across southern Europe and the evacuation of more than 320,000 people in Spain and France. Greece is now the third country in the same sequence, and the difference here is that personnel on duty were killed, three of them within one day.
For travellers the practical takeaway is narrow. The southern coast of Rethymno, between Agia Galini and Triopetra, is not a place to hold a booking right now, and the 112 system pushes its alerts to foreign numbers on roaming as well, so they are worth reading the moment they land. Greek authorities have not published a burned-area estimate for Crete, because that is not measured while the front is still running.
