Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Greek firefighters have given water to a thirsty deer they rescued from a burning forest in Rhodes, Greece.
Tour operators flew more than 2,000 holidaymakers home as wildfires raged on the island of Rhodes in what the Greek government said was the largest evacuation ever undertaken in the country.
More repatriation flights are due today and tomorrow as the fires remained out of control and the Civil Protection authority warned the threat of further fires was high in almost every part of Greece, gripped by a heatwave.
Fires burning since Wednesday on Rhodes forced 19,000 people to leave homes and hotels over the weekend as an inferno reached coastal resorts on the island’s southeast.
A wildfire on the island of Corfu also led to the evacuation of about 2,400 visitors and locals from Corfu overnight, a fire service spokesman said, adding that the departures were a precaution.
Greece has been sweltering under a lengthy spell of extreme heat that has exacerbated wildfire risk and left visitors stranded in peak tourist season.
“For the next few weeks we must be on constant alert. We are at war, we will rebuild what we lost, we will compensate those who were hurt,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told parliament.
“The climate crisis is already here, it will manifest itself everywhere in the Mediterranean with greater disasters.”
Kelly Squirrel, a transport administrator from the UK, said police had ordered people from her hotel on Rhodes to evacuate.
“We had to keep walking,” she told AFP at the international airport. “So we walked for about six hours in the heat.”
The former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg says that “high-cost green policies are not popular”. Taking aim at supposed climate-related “costs, charges [and] taxes”, the chair of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of Conservative MPs, Craig Mackinlay, insists that “there’s a lot to learn from Uxbridge – that a way to create some significant blue water between us and Labour is to rethink these charges and the net zero pathway” (note the disingenuousness of these messages: the Tory ban on onshore wind actually costs UK households £180 a year).
The biggest intervention so far has come from the the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, who used an interview with the Sunday Telegraph – and its front-page splash – to lay out his opinions, advising against “treating the cause of the environment as a religious crusade”, warning of a backlash from the public and suggesting what he calls a more “thoughtful environmentalism”.
Greek police on Monday arrested a man suspected of starting an ongoing wildfire near Athens fuelled by a heatwave and strong winds, firefighters said.
“Police carried out the arrest of a foreigner who allegedly caused the fire” in Kouvaras, around 50 kilometres (30 miles) southeast of Athens, said fire service spokesman Yannis Artopios.
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