Fourteen people were killed by flooding in Greece and adjacent countries while 800 were rescued from the torrents. More than 800 people have been rescued from flooding in Greece over the past two days, according to the fire department. Severe rainstorms have transformed streets into raging torrents, sending vehicles into the sea and washing away roads. Rainstorms have also struck neighboring Bulgaria and Turkey, killing 14 persons in the three nations, including three in Greece.
Fire department spokesperson Vasilis Vathrakogiannis stated that swift water rescue specialists and divers from the department’s disaster response units and the army were participating in rescue efforts and attempting to reach inaccessible areas despite the destruction of roads.
The flooding followed devastating wildfires that destroyed vast swaths of forest and farmland, burned homes, and claimed the lives of more than twenty people.
Read more: Brazil is devastated by its worst cyclone disaster.
Thursday’s flooding was concentrated primarily in the central villages of Karditsa, where residents reportedly sought refuge on their roofs from rising water levels. More rain was forecast for later in the day.
In some areas, the inundation exceeded 6 feet in height, according to Vathrakrakiannis. People were evacuated using tracked vehicles and boats, but the ships could not reach some areas due to the debris volume and the raging floodwaters’ intensity. He added that frequent lightning rendered helicopters incapable of flight.
Rainfall equivalent to 2 years in 12 hours
Pavlos Marinakis, a government spokesman, stated that some areas received more than twice the average annual precipitation of Athens in just 12 hours.
Nikos Dendias cut short a trip to Dubai and returned to Greece “to oversee the greatest contribution of the Armed Forces in dealing with the consequences of the severe weather,” he announced on X, the social media platform formerly Twitter.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis postponed his annual address on the status of the economy and a news conference scheduled for the weekend in the northern city of Thessaloniki to visit the flooded areas.
Three regions, including the island of Skiathos, are off-limits to vehicular traffic, and numerous emergency phone alerts have been sent to residents in various parts of the country, warning them to stay indoors and avoid basements and ground floors of buildings.
Multiple rainstorms struck the Greek capital on Wednesday, flooding streets and transforming a portion of a central avenue in the city center into a mud river that swept people off their feet.
Drowning fatalities in three nations
According to the Greek fire service, the record rainfall was responsible for at least three fatalities near the central city of Volos and in Karditsa, further to the west. Three individuals were reported as missing.
Meanwhile, a flash flood near the Bulgarian border in northwest Turkey killed at least five people and swept away bungalow dwellings. Another two people perished in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, where Tuesday’s storms inundated hundreds of homes and workplaces in several neighborhoods.
A typhoon caused flooding on the southern Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. Wednesday saw the recovery of two bodies from the ocean, bringing the total number of fatalities to four.
Extreme weather and global warming
Extreme weather events, including record-breaking high temperatures and torrential rainfall, have ravaged much of Europe and the rest of the world this year, with climatologists pointing to human-caused global warming as a significant cause. Even as the drenching storms began pummeling Greece, fire personnel in other parts of the country worked to extinguish the unprecedented, deadly wildfires. Warmer oceans fuel more powerful, less predictable storms, and the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization released new data Wednesday indicating the past three months have been the hottest ever recorded globally.
To “defuse the climate time bomb,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged wealthy nations in March to accelerate their carbon neutrality goals to as close to 2040 as possible (most countries are presently targeting 2050).
“Humanity is on thin ice, and that ice is melting quickly,” the U.N. chief said in a video message as a panel of experts released a report he compared to a “survival guide for humanity.”
