We're currently in Thessaloniki for a weekend break when we were rudely awakened on Sunday @2am by both our phone kicking off with a Greek Civil defence alert about a wildfire raging though the City's suburbs - "keep windows closed and prepare for evacuation" - Quite a scary experience, the alert not the wildfire as we realised it wasn't going to reach us down at the waterfront. The authorities seemed to have it under control yesterday morning and by the afternoon the smoke pall had dispersed.
9.30pm, and they've given the order to evacuate a whole village because of the intense smoke. I suspect many will have already made plans or gone already, given the intensity. I did the same voluntarily in 2022, even though the fire authorities said that no properties were at risk. The speed at which the fire is progressing, I suspect it'll pass by/through in a couple of days, the only question then being what damage is done that they come back to, when given the all-clear. The only slight consolation is that our fire of 2022 created at least some additional firebreaks by human intervention at the time, and what was burnt.
I can't help thinking that longer term they are going to have to bite the bullet and give themselves more chances in such situations by pre-emptively making firebreaks and improving access in even historic forests. I was only in the affected forest last year on bikes with friends, and I suspect it'll be utterly unrecognisable when I go back. At least here it only took out bands of trees and whizzed under the canopy in many places, so there's still a lot of tree cover, and (of course) the grasses have exploited the opportunity.
In some ways, it's not a disaster for nature in the longer term, and it'll work out how to exploit the 'new normal', but it's going to take hundreds of years to get to the kind of stable-ish state it's enjoyed for the past few hundred/thousand years. 'Short term' is measured as 100 years, which they reckon is the time it takes for a forest to show no signs of a fire that ravaged it.
It's all terribly grim, and I still twitch when I hear helicopters and the thrum of Canadairs.
