Greece might be an example of a relatively developed European country that could slide into chaos under repeated battering by climate fueled wildfires and storms.
Fires denuded hillsides earlier in the summer, and now in a matter of a few weeks, devastating rains have compounded the damage and misery, including significant impacts on key agricultural areas.
A second powerful storm in less than a month hammered parts of central Greece on Thursday, sweeping away roads, smashing bridges and flooding thousands of homes.
The storm — called Elias — caused extensive flooding in the central city of Volos and left hundreds stranded in nearby mountain villages. The fire service carried out multiple rescues and evacuations, authorities said. Rescuers were also searching a mountainous area for the pilot of a private helicopter that went missing in the bad weather .
“All of Volos has turned into a lake,” Volos Mayor Achilleas Beos told state television. “People’s lives are in danger. Even I remained trapped, and 80% of the city is without power. … I don’t know where God found so much water. It’s like the story of Noah’s Ark.”
Bad weather earlier this month struck the same area, killing 16 people, and causing more than 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in damage to farms and infrastructure.
–Residents in Volos used plastic buckets and blooms to push the mud out of their homes and to try to protect their belongings. Among them was 83-year-old Apostolis Dafereras, who has lived in a suburb of the city since 1955.
“I have never seen anything like this,” Dafereras said, looking out the window of his ground-floor home as knee-high flood water gushed past. Earlier, he and other residents on his street tried to push mud and flood water out of his home.
I know it is of no comfort to the people of Volos and the nearby towns, but a quick double whammy doesn’t do much more damage than the first. They get most of the deaths and the homelessness and bankruptcies and suicides from the first hit.
The people in places like Ellicott City or certain spots on the Hurricane Coast get just enough time to spend money on rebuilding before getting hit again.