OREN, Turkey — Turkish coastguards evacuated hundreds of
villagers from a burning power plant on Thursday and Greek firefighters battled
a major blaze near the ancient Olympic site as a record heatwave wreaked havoc
across Europe's southeast.
اضافة اعلان
The two regional rivals have been united this week in their fight against
disasters that officials and experts link to increasingly frequent and intense
weather events caused by climate change.
Eight people have died, and dozens have been hospitalized across the
southern coasts of Turkey since the wildfires erupted last week.
The blazes in Greece this week briefly cut off the main road leading to
Athens and saw worrying fires break out in Olympia — the birthplace of the
Olympic Games that is usually crowded with tourists — and on the island of
Evia.
Greece deployed large forces near Olympia to protect archaeological sites
where the first Olympic Games were held in antiquity.
"We're waging a battle of the titans!" Greek deputy minister for
civil protection Nikos Hardalias said.
But perhaps the biggest shock came when winds whipped up a flash fire that
subsumed the grounds of an Aegean coast power plant in Turkey storing thousands
of tonnes of coal.
'Where could we
go?'
An AFP team saw firefighters and police fleeing the 35-year-old Kemerkoy
plant in the Aegean province of Mugla as bright balls of orange flames tore
through the surrounding hills.
Hundreds of villagers — many clutching small bags of belongings grabbed from
their abandoned houses as the evacuation call sounded — piled onto coastguard
speedboats at the nearby port of Oren.
The regional authority said, "all explosive chemicals" and other
hazardous material had been removed from the strategic site.
"But there's a risk that the fire could spread to the thousands of
tonnes of coal inside," regional mayor Osman Gurun told reporters.
A few older villagers in Oren refused to leave the disaster-hit region even
while thousands of others were shuttled out by car or boats racing along the
Aegean Sea.
"Where do you want us to go at our age?" asked 79-year-old Hulusi
Kinic.
"We live here. This is our home. Our last solution was to throw
ourselves in the sea (if there was an explosion) but thank God that did not
happen."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office said an initial inspection
showed the overnight blazes left "no serious damage to the main units in
the plant".
'Asking for
reinforcements'
More than 100 blazes were still burning in Greece and 180 have ignited in
Turkey since July 28 — more than a dozen of them still active on Wednesday
night.
The EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service said July was the second hottest
on record in Europe.
Greece's Hardalias said earlier this week that the ferocity of the fires
ravaging the region meant that "we are no longer talking about climate
change but a climate threat".
The unfolding disasters saw the leaders of both countries come under
pressure from local officials for what they felt was an insufficiently resolute
response.
"We are asking the authorities to reinforce the air and land forces to
so as not to risk human lives," Limni mayor Giorgos Tsapourniotis told
Greece's ANA news agency.
The Turkish mayor of the town of Milas spent days waging a social media
campaign trying to get officials to send firefighting planes that could douse
the flames before they engulfed the power plant.
Erdogan on the
defensive
Erdogan has come under especially withering criticism for being slow or
unwilling to accept some offers of foreign assistance after revealing that
Turkey had no functioning firefighting planes.
The crisis has posed an unexpected challenge to the powerful Turkish leader
two years before he faces an election that could extend his rule into a third
decade.
Erdogan tried to mount a political counterattack in a television interview
Wednesday that began just as news broke that the fire had reached the Aegean
power plant.
"When fires break out in America or Russia, (the opposition) stands by
the government. We don't have this," Erdogan said.
The prosecutors' office in Ankara said Thursday it has launched an
investigation into social media posts about the fire that were "trying to
create anxiety, fear and panic in the public, and to humiliate the Turkish
government".
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