Eighteen charred bodies were found in a remote village in northern Greece on Tuesday, where wildfires have been raging for days, the fire brigade said as a heatwave hitting southern Europe turned deadly.
Greek media, without citing sources, said the bodies found south of the village of Avantas in northern Greece were thought to be of migrants. The broader Evros region is a popular route for migrants crossing from Turkey into Greece.
On Monday, the burned body of another man believed to be a migrant was found in the region, a local police official said.
Firefighters were also battling blazes in Spain, Italy and Portugal as well was two new blazes that broke out near the Greek capital, Athens, as the region suffered hot, dry and windy conditions that scientists have linked to climate change.
In Spain, where most of the country was in very high or extreme risk of wildfire as a consequence of the summer’s fourth heatwave, authorities were struggling to stabilise a huge wildfire that has been ravaging forests on the island of Tenerife for a week.
Temperatures were likely to reach or exceed 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in large areas of the southwest and northeast of the Iberian peninsula, national weather agency AEMET said.
In the Greek port town of Alexandroupolis, not far from Avantason, wildfires forced the evacuation of dozens of hospital patients, including newborn babies. A ferry was turned into a makeshift hospital after 65 patients were evacuated from the University Hospital.
Elderly patients lay on mattresses strewn across the cafeteria floor, paramedics attended to others on stretchers and a woman held a man resting on a sofa, an IV drip attached to his hand.
“I’ve been working for 27 years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said nurse Nikos Gioktsidis. “Stretchers everywhere, patients here, IV drips there … it was like a war, like a bomb had exploded.”
The burned body of a man believed to be a migrant was found in a rural area near Alexandroupolis on Monday, a local police official said.
“Weather conditions are extreme and will remain extreme for the coming days,” Fire Service spokesman Vassilis Varthakogiannis told ERT TV.
Reporting by Alexandros Avramidis in Alexandropoulis, Karolina Tagaris and Lefteris Papadimas in Athens, Dominique Vidalon in Paris, Gisela Vignoni and Crispian Balmer in Rome, Patricia Rua in Lisbon and Emma Farge in Geneva; Writing by Ingrid Melander and European bureaus; Editing by Janet Lawrence and Conor Humphries
(Source: Reuters)
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