The effects of global warming continue to be felt all over the World with freak heat waves, flooding and wildfires from Australia to Japan, Sweden, Norway and now a wildfire in Greece.
Reports coming out of Greece reveal that at least 50 people have been killed and scores injured by a wildfire killed that swept through the small resort town of Mati near Athens, trapping families with children behind walls of smoke and flames as they tried to flee to the beach.
The Greece wildfire which broke out on Monday Afternoon and was still burning in some areas on Tuesday is the worst incident in Greece since the wildfire incident that scorched the southern Peloponnese peninsula in August 2007; that fire also killed dozens of people
Read: GLOBAL WARMING: HEAT WAVE KILL 44 ACROSS JAPAN – DEATH TOLL EXPECTED TO RISE
In what might have been a scene from the destruction of ancient Pompei on the Italian Coast, people ran down to the sea for their lives as the Wildfire closed in near the shore as hundreds were rescued by passing boats while others couldn’t make it as the flames overtook them.
Commenting on the Greece wildfire, Nikos Economopoulos, head of Greece’s Red Cross said,
“I was briefed by a rescuer that he saw the shocking picture of 26 people tightly huddled in a field some 30 meters from the beach,” “They had tried to find an escape route but unfortunately these people and their kids didn’t make it in time,”
Several eyewitness reports claim to have seen at least four dead people on a narrow road clogged with cars heading to a nearby beach as well as reports of several more casualties in the area.
A Brigade spokesperson reported,
“Residents and visitors in the area did not escape in time even though they were a few meters from the sea or in their homes,”
Mati is located in the eastern Rafina region, a popular spot for Greek holiday-makers, especially pensioners and children at camps, about 29 km (18 miles) east of the capital.
The coastguard reported that four more bodies had been retrieved from the sea while they had rescued 696 people who had fled to beaches in conjunction with other vessels in the area.
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