Burned dead bodies of 18 people were discovered on Tuesday as wildfires ripped through Greece and countries across Europe in another extreme heat wave.
The fire brigade said Tuesday that the bodies found near a village in northern Greece may have been migrants. On Monday, another person was killed in a fire northwest of the capital Athens.
As dozens of wildfires scorch Greece, other parts of the region are suffering under intense heat, as Europe’s summer of extremes continues. More than 20 countries are under heat warnings with temperatures reaching record-breaking levels in some areas.
Yiannis Artopios, an official from the Greek fire brigade, said hundreds of firefighters in Greece are fighting 65 wildfires that have broken out in the last few days, the state-run ANMA news agency reported on Monday.
With 13 communities evacuated since Saturday, Greek's northeastern town of Alexandroupolis has experienced some major ongoing wildfires, according to the fire brigade.
On Tuesday, two hundred patients were evacuated from two hospitals in the town.
Talking to Reuters, an Alexandroupolis Hospital Nurse, Nikos Gioktsidis, compared the situation to war. She said: “I’ve been working for 27 years, I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like war conditions, really.”
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Emergency Management Service, as of Monday, fires have burned through more than 8,500 hectares (21,000 acres).
The European Union has also deployed two firefighting aircraft from Cyprus and a team from Romania with 50 firefighters to help Greece control the fires.
Artopios from the Greek fire brigade said Monday: “We are in a state of emergency of ‘Category 5’ as we will be also on Tuesday due to the very high temperatures and the gale force winds,” ANMA reported.
Greece has faced a devastating wildfire season this year, encountering its most severe recorded fires in July since at least 2003. Recent deadly wildfires swept through parts of the Greek island of Rhodes, prompting the largest evacuation effort in the country's history as thousands of tourists fled their hotels.
Simultaneously, uncontrolled wildfires are raging in Tenerife, one of Spain's Canary Islands, leading to the evacuation of over 12,000 residents. The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced plans to declare the affected areas as "disaster zones" once the fires are contained.
While Greece and Spain grapple with these blazes, other European countries are also witnessing record-breaking temperatures in other regions.
Heat warnings encompass 21 countries across the continent, with six under the highest level of red heat warnings, according to MeteoAlarm, a network of European national weather services.
France, in particular, is heavily impacted by the heat wave. The national meteorological agency, Météo France, stated that this week's heatwave would be the "hottest of summer 2023." Rarely does such an intense heatwave occur so late in the season. "Red-level" heatwave alerts were issued in four French departments.
Italian cities are also experiencing soaring temperatures. Savona, in the northwest, registered an all-time high of 39.1 degrees Celsius (102.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on Monday. Switzerland is grappling with the effects of high temperatures as well. The freezing level record was broken as a weather balloon reached an unprecedented altitude of 5,298 meters above sea level before hitting the freezing point.
This persistent heatwave raises concerns about the condition of Swiss glaciers. In the previous year, Swiss glaciers experienced their worst rate of melting on record, losing 6% of their remaining volume.
This ongoing European heatwave is anticipated to persist until at least Wednesday before a cooling trend offers some respite. Scientists are clear that the extreme weather events witnessed in Europe and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere are likely to intensify due to the human-caused climate crisis.
July 2023 was the hottest month on record globally, and researchers have found that the Mediterranean and US heatwaves that occurred would have been nearly impossible without the influence of human-induced climate change.
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