On Saturday, a 50-year-old man was dragged into the car by the bodies of water and drowned. An initially missing 49-year-old could not be found dead until Sunday – the water had washed her into the sea. The police and fire brigade took countless calls from affected citizens and the power went out on the spot.
Video footage showed masses of water and mud flowing with tremendous force through narrow streets, taking dozens of cars, garbage and even large boulders.
“It was the worst storm in the last 100 years,” the regional governor of Crete, Stavros Arnaoutakis, told the news portal Protothema on Sunday. The daily “Kathimerini” wrote about a “biblical catastrophe”.
airport under water
The flash floods caused by heavy rainfall acted like a reverse tsunami — they just wiped everything out, geology professor Efthymios Lekkas said on state radio. The storm raged mainly in the region around the Cretan capital Heraklion.
The city’s airport was closed for hours on Saturday. Dozens of holiday planes had to be diverted to the western Cretan city of Chania and also to Athens airport because the runway in Heraklion was under water.
Sunday came to rest. According to meteorologists, the storm moved in a significantly weakened direction towards Turkey’s southern coast. (SDA)