1,500 people evacuated as wildfire rages on Greek island of Crete

By LYNSEY CHUTEL and NIKI KITSANTONIS

About 1,500 people, many of them tourists, were evacuated from hotels and homes on the Greek island of Crete on Thursday as firefighters struggled to control a wildfire in arid conditions.

Greece, like much of southern Europe, has been experiencing a heat wave that has created the hot and dry conditions that exacerbate wildfires. On Crete, temperatures were forecast between 33 and 36 degrees Celsius, or about 91 to 97 Fahrenheit, and Greece’s meteorological service issued an alert for extremely high temperatures.

Firefighters were also working to douse smaller blazes on the Greek mainland, and Greece’s Civil Protection Ministry issued an orange alert signaling a “very high” risk of fires in the Athens area, the southern Peloponnese peninsula and several Aegean Islands.

Hours after the warning, a fire broke out in Rafina, a port east of Athens, forcing a ferry carrying 125 passengers and 17 crew members to divert, according to a statement from the Hellenic Coast Guard.

In Crete, more than 200 firefighters worked to douse the blaze from several angles in the sweltering heat, but their work was made more difficult by gale-force winds and rugged mountain terrain, Greece’s fire service spokesperson, Vassilis Vathrakoyiannis, said during a televised news conference.

Wind gusts of up to about 50 mph were “creating new spots and fronts, making the firefighting effort much more difficult,” he said.

The fire began in villages outside Ierapetra, a city on the island’s southeastern coast. As it spread overnight and into Thursday, the island’s authorities, including members of the coast guard, hustled to evacuate hundreds of people.

About 1,200 of those were tourists, said Mayor Manolis Frangoulis. There were no reports of injuries or deaths.

“It was like hell on earth,” the mayor said. “There were thousands of patches of fire, springing up everywhere each time the wind blew and threw blazing pine cones this way and that.”

Kathy Kearns, 68, who was visiting the village of Agios Ioannis, decided to pack her bags after seeing black smoke over the horizon Wednesday evening.

“Since I live in California, I know this scenario well,” she said. “The wind blows embers for miles.”

Many more tourists boarded buses to other hotels and centers that had been set up on safer parts of the island, with the glow of wildfires in the background, according to video broadcast on Greek television.

In recent weeks, fires have devastated tens of thousands of acres of land in Greece. Last month, a fire on the island of Chios burned nearly 15,000 acres of forest and officials evacuated dozens of communities.