ATHENS — Firefighters battled blazes across Greece on Tuesday after a difficult night on the island of Evia, northeast of the capital Athens, where residents pitched in with water hoses and buckets in a desperate effort to save their homes. Wildfires were also still burning in nearby Turkey, where at least eight people have died, as well as in Italy and other parts of southern Europe where a record-breaking heat wave has created unusually dry conditions and spurred debate about the damage wreaked by climate change. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a televised address on Monday night that the authorities were doing “everything humanly possible” to extinguish the fires across the country, which he described as a “natural disaster of unprecedented proportions.” The fires have destroyed more than 200,000 acres of forestland in Greece, according to the National Observatory of Athens’ weather service Meteo, with the areas of key concern on Evia and in the southern Peloponnese Peninsula.

Source: International New York Times August 10, 2021 11:47 UTC