Unprecedented floods in Greece have caused at least ten deaths

At least ten dead and four missing is a temporary balance sheet of the unprecedented floods that hit Greece this week which the Greek authorities did this Friday, about 24 hours after the storm subsided “Daniel.”

The authorities fear that the number of victims will increase in the coming days, while the extent of the damage is still impossible to quantify because it has only just begun to emerge with the gradual receding of the water.

Minister of Civil Protection, Vasilis Kikiliashe spoke of an “unprecedented” meteorological phenomenon, and described the damage to the infrastructure as “enormous”.

Professor of Natural Disaster Management at the University of Athens, Efthimios Lekkashe told the public service ERT today that they could exceed one billion euros.

In addition to infrastructure, the disaster is also a severe blow to Hellenic agriculture, as the affected areas are home to the country’s largest crop fields.

Despite the rain having stopped, thousands of people are still trapped in the most threatened areas, and rescue teams – firefighters and Armed Forces with helicopters – continue with complicated rescue tasks.

The Coast Guard reported today that The lifeless body of a woman was found on a beach in the Magnesia region.

In the same area, as reported by the portal news247, two more men were found dead this Friday who were swept away by the flood, while in the Karditsa region one woman drowned in her flooded house.

These deaths are added to others six found in the past few days.

Four people are still missing in the Magnesia region, including a newly married Austrian couple who were on holiday on the Pelion peninsula.

In this region, thousands of residents and tourists were left without electricity and water in cities and tourist centers because the road network connecting to the capital of the region, Volos, was destroyed, reports the state agency AMNA.

From Monday to this Friday more than 1800 people were savedthe firemen said.

It is feared that the number of victims will increase, since the area of ​​Thessaly (in the center), which is the most affected by the huge water bodies, contains large cities where thousands of people live.

“There are corpses on the streets,” Polivios Polizos, a resident of one of the flooded towns, who was rescued with an inflatable raft, told MEGA television.

On Tuesday, heavy rains left a record in the city of Zagorá, in the mentioned region 754 liters per square meter in 24 hoursalmost twice as much as the previous maximum, recorded in 2009.

The Prime Minister, a conservative Kyriakos Mitsotakishe went to the affected areas today, where he spoke about the “unprecedented” phenomenon and hinted that he would ask the European Union for “maximum possible support” to eliminate the consequences of the disaster.

Despite the heavy rains stopping on Thursday afternoon, several towns in the Larisa region were flooded on Friday evening as the Peneo River, the largest in the area, overflowed its banks.

The authorities had to order the evacuation of several towns, while even within Larisa, a city of 270,000 inhabitants, several neighborhoods woke up flooded.

According to images from the European Sentinel-1 satellite analyzed by the National Observatory in Athens, it is estimated that around 72,000 hectares in the center of the country have been flooded.

The storm comes after a disastrous summer, with several heat waves and dozens of fires that burned more than 150,000 hectares, about 1.2% of the territory, and left 25 dead.

President of the association European Commission, Ursula von der Leyenhe said on Thursday that the European Union is ready to send support Greece, Bulgaria and Turkeywhich have suffered storms and floods with deaths in recent days.

“Europe stands by those affected by the devastating floods in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. We are ready to activate our European Civil Protection Mechanism,” Von der Leyen wrote on the X social network.