The two-person flight crew of a firefighting helicopter was killed in a midair collision in Greece on Sunday as forces battled wildfires that have devastated the area.
Two hired helicopters collided while battling a wildfire in the Psatha area west of Athens, the fire service said.
“The pilots...were taken unconscious to hospital, where their death was confirmed,” the fire department’s director of communications Vassilis Vathrakogiannis said in a new conference.
Photo: EPA
Footage showed one of the helicopters colliding with the underbelly of the other helicopter before exploding and plunging to the ground.
The crew of the second helicopter was rescued.
Hundreds of firefighters were attempting to keep a fire west of Athens from approaching the outskirts of Athens after it crossed a mountain overnight.
The fire department grounded all helicopters of that model in the area pending an investigation, state media said.
The two dead crewmembers are from Denmark and Greece, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a statement, who had warned of “extremely difficult” days ahead.
The accident raised the death toll from this series of Greek wildfires to five, after three firefighters died in Crete and the Peloponnese.
WEATHER HOLD
The helicopters had been leased from Australia’s McDermott Aviation, part of a fleet of 15. The company has said it has supported operations in Greece for the past seven years.
Officials had warned for days that violent winds made firefighting operations from the air hazardous, and most aircraft had been grounded until Sunday.
Mitsotakis had earlier said Greece was experiencing “extreme weather conditions” with winds that had reached 100kph.
“When the winds blow with such force, even the dozens of aircraft we have at our disposal cannot operate safely,” he wrote on social media.
Vathrakogiannis said 220 forest and agricultural fires had broken out around the country since last week.
Until then, Greece had been relatively spared from heat waves and major fires this summer, unlike France and Spain.
MOST DIFFICULT DAYS
“We are perhaps going through the most difficult days of the summer,” Vathrakogiannis said.
A 44-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of deliberately starting a fire on the Ionian island of Cephalonia, according to the Greek news agency ANA.
Two other men working for an electricity company were arrested in connection to a massive fire near the Porto Germeno coastal village on the Gulf of Corinth, which was apparently started by a power cable spark on Friday. Greece’s National Observatory climate tracker said early estimates indicated that more than 6,500 hectares had been burned in fires on the Gulf of Corinth which swept Porto Germeno.
It added that meteorological conditions remained adverse “mainly due to strong northerly winds, which, however, have partially weakened compared to previous days.”
Porto Germeno and other villages were evacuated when the fire broke out on Friday but local authorities say scores of homes were damaged or destroyed.
Many left pets behind, with municipal crews and volunteers on Sunday rescuing dozens of dogs and leaving food for any cats that could not be caught.
“We could not believe what we were seeing, the fire spread extremely rapidly,” Nikos Georgopoulos from the laboratory of forest management at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, said in an interview.
MEGAFIRE
Earlier this week, fires on the islands of Crete and Paros affected another 6,000 hectares according to Meteo.gr.
Theodore Giannaros, a wildfire meteorologist and senior researcher at the National Observatory, said the fires around Porto Germeno appeared to have affected an area of more than 10,000 hectares — almost double the original estimate.
“It is highly likely [if not almost certain] that this particular wildfire will be classified as a megafire,” Giannaros wrote on social media.
Greece’s Civil Protection Minister Evangelos Tournas on Saturday said the fire department had been “pushed to its limits.”
Gale-force winds created “extremely difficult conditions resulting in many cases where aircraft either cannot draw water or cannot carry out drops due to extreme turbulence,” Tournas said.
The greater Athens area and nearby Voiotia and the island of Evia are under near maximum fire risk on Monday for a second consecutive day, the civil protection ministry said.
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