Evia, the paradise turned into hell: first by fire, then by water
This article is part of a series of three articles from El Diario’s larger multimedia project on mega-fires in Europe by Mariangela Paone, Raúl Rejón, Sofía Pérez and Raúl Sánchez. Introduction | Part I | Part II | Part III
Rovies (Greece)
The road that winds through the mountains shows, curve after curve, the contrasts that have made Euboea famous: the slopes covered with pine forests that reach up to bathe in the crystal clear waters of the Aegean, mixed with olive trees and shrubs of aromatic herbs. The dominant green in this spring that looks too much like summer is broken by the beehives of the honey producers and the purple-pink flowers of the crazy carob trees that dot the landscape from time to time.
At midday when the sun plummets overhead, nature looks buoyant. It is towards sunset when the oblique rays reveal more painful contrasts. The gray that stains many slopes then becomes more evident: they are the skeletons of burned trees, hundreds of pine and fir trees already dead, some still towering towards the sky like plucked giants, many others fallen and scattered on the ground like sticks of a huge Mikado. These are the wounds that Euboea retains from the fire that for days, in the summer of 2021, ravaged the north of the island, plunging the local population into anguish that two years later has still not been erased.
“We had a paradise that turned into a hell. The forests burned, we lost the olive trees, the animals and, with them, a part of our soul,” says Dimitris Alexiou, a retired physics teacher, as he savors a cappuccino, on a terrace in the main square of Rovies, one of the villages hardest hit by the fire. There are days in which he still seems to perceive the smell of burning that lingered in the air for months in the most affected areas of this island, the second largest in Greece, where the fire burned 52,000 hectares, in one of the most destructive fires in recent years in Europe.
“The flames surrounded the houses. A small fire became a huge fire, which in three hours became uncontrollable because, in these cases, either you are there immediately or it is impossible to stop it. When the fire started, at the beginning of August, they didn’t send planes immediately because they were busy in other operations near Athens and in ancient Olympia. They sacrificed this part of Euboea to save Varibobi,” says Alexiou, referring to the green suburb 20 kilometers from Athens that was also engulfed in flames in those days.
It is a consideration shared among neighbors. “When the planes arrived, it was already too late,” says the professor. Behind his back, behind the last houses, stands the mountain that, he says, has changed its face. The green it looks is because of the new vegetation that grew after the fire and that deceives the visitor who has no memory of the pine and fir trees that covered its slopes. “All the chronic problems of the Greek state manifested themselves at once,” says Alexiou, marking the Greek word ἐπῐφᾰ́νειᾰ, epiphany. “We saw fear and lack of preparedness. And that the main goal of the authorities was to evacuate everyone.” Weighing on the decisions of Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ conservative government was the memory of what had happened with the 2018 fire in Mati, in the Attica region, a disaster in which 102 people died and which dealt a huge blow to the then Syriza-led executive.
“That’s why the emergency services were focused on the evacuation,” confirms Theodoros Keris, who is attending to elDiario.es in a pause while working on site on the latest assignment he has had for his small construction company. He is the president of the community of Rovies, which encompasses the town and nearby villages, and as such in those days of August 2021 he became the civil protection coordinator for the area.
The figure of Keris, a man with a strong build and a steady gaze, seems to shrink as, sitting with his back to the sea, he begins to recall what the village experienced. “It was like a war zone. On the fourth day without sleep I closed my eyes for a few minutes. Then I went out to sea with my SUV, stopped it near the shore and dived into the water after having tied myself to the vehicle with a rope, because that way if I fell asleep I wouldn’t be carried away by the current,” says Keris, while his gaze wanders as if, for a few moments, he were reliving the anguish he felt.
“There was no plan to stop the fire. Why? Because they didn’t know how to put out fires in forests, they only knew how to act in urban areas. There were no helicopters, no airplanes…. I didn’t sleep for days, trying to save what we could,” he says. Like many others here, he points to 1998 as the origin of what happened in 2021 in Euboea and also – in even worse dimensions – in 2023 in Evros in northern Greece. That year, there was a change of authority in the management of forest fires from the forest service to the fire department.
“It was a strategic mistake by the Greek state. Up to that time, the fire department was an intervention corps in urban areas. In 1998, there was an overnight change without preparation, without training. 26 years later the firefighters tell you that they are still learning, because they have limitations in terms of training and equipment and, above all, they do not know the territory in which they are going to act. And this, and I say this also as a civil protection volunteer, is what determines 90% of the success in fires,” says Elias Tziritis, Wildfire Action Coordinator of WWF Greece.
It was a shift that further unbalanced the balance of resources, in a context where, according to Tziritis, state intervention is largely based on a philosophy of suppression rather than prevention. According to a report published by the organization in 2022, the result of an unpublished investigation into the management and allocation of funds, in the 2016-2020 period, almost 84% of resources went to fire suppression and only 16% to prevention.
“For the past 20 years, from the early 2000s until now, the forest service has been severely underfunded to do prevention, with cuts of up to 50%. After the publication of our report, for the first time in 25 years, the government announced a plan, the Antinero project, for forest fuel management with a substantial increase in funding. However, they are not enough. If two years ago it was 16/84 now the ratio is 20/80. We need to reach at least a ratio of 40/60, that is to say to increase much more the investment in prevention, which is the strategy that Portugal has adopted after the 2017 fires,” stresses Tziritis.
From the newly created Greek Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, in response to questions from elDiario.es they report that joint training of the forestry service and the fire department has begun in the Attica region, in areas identified as most vulnerable, in collaboration with the electricity utility company and the national electricity distribution operator. “The Greek government is working in a coordinated and methodical way on the strategy ‘prevention, preparedness, readiness, readiness, immediate intervention’,” said Minister Vassilis Kikilias, who appealed to the public for a collective awareness and effort in the face of a season that looks set to be difficult. Among the actions decided after the extreme events of recent years is the creation of a national risk database and the approval of a program to reinforce and modernize the Civil Protection teams, although the new equipment will not arrive until 2025. The training of 650 new firefighters for 10 new Special Forestry Operations Units has also been completed, adding to the six existing ones.
Another of the conclusions of the WWF report highlighted the gaps in transparency and accountability, and in citizen participation in the planning process of needs identification or decision-making procedures.
This is precisely one of the reasons why Dimitris Alexiou together with 40 other citizens from the fire-stricken localities of Evia, such as Rovies and Limni, have created an association, which they have called EGEAS, to demand that the local population be more involved in the planning of environmental management and of the funds for the interventions decided by the Government after the fires of 2021 and also of what came after. For in Euboea after the fire, destruction came by water.
The island suffered the devastating effects of storms Daniel and Elias, which occurred in September 2023 separated by a handful of days. At least 17 people died across the country and in some places it rained in one day as much as it usually rains in a year. “Greece is facing a war in peacetime,” Mitsotakis said at the time. “The climate crisis is here and it forces us to look at everything differently.”
“After the floods, what scares me is not the fire, but the water. What happened in September was a consequence of the fires. It is a heavy inheritance they left. And it can happen again,” says Vangelis Triantafillou as he reviews the videos he shot with his cell phone those weeks when water and mud flooded the streets of Gouves. This village – whose name, Triantafillou explains, means “basin”, because it stands in a small valley surrounded by mountains – had made the front pages of half the world two years earlier with the images of the fire surrounding the houses, and the iconic photo signed by journalist Konstantinos Tsakalidis of a woman despairing in front of her house, chosen by Time magazine as one of the photos of the year.
Triantafillou, who is president of the local community of Gouves (330 residents and another 30 from the nearby small village of Kastrí), remembers when he received the call from the emergency services with the first evacuation order. “It was one of the worst days of my life, if I think about it now I still get goose bumps. We didn’t expect the fire to come so fast. We had to inform people, ring the bells of the village church to let everyone know what was going on,” he says, sitting on the porch of the taverna that his family opened thirty years ago in what had been the home of his great-grandparents. His photos hang on a wall next to other portraits of the family saga and pictures of a rural world that for centuries has lived from the richness of the mountain: honey, wood, olives, tree resin.
“I understood the evacuation order to a certain extent. I was fine with evacuating the elderly, the vulnerable, the children, but the rest? The rest of us, able to work and help, had to stay because we knew the territory and knew how best to deal with the fires,” he says. It was what he and many others did. “We stayed and worked all as one, as a fist, and used every means at our disposal to try to put out the fire. We empowered ourselves.” It was this, he says, that allowed none of the houses in the village to burn down, as happened in other towns on the island.
When Triantafillou is asked if he thinks anything has changed in the past two years, he first shrugs and nods. Then, he adds that there has been some clearing of the bush, for which the forestry services have hired people who before the fires work with the resin from the trees. “But there are no plans, it’s just that we already have a master’s degree in fire. We don’t expect anything or anyone to do anything. If it happens again, we’ll be here to defend our homes.”
The fear of fire has been lost, but the fear of water remains. Here and elsewhere on the island, after the 2021 fires, concrete barriers were planned to be built to contain debris and channel water in the event of heavy rains. “The projects did not arrive in time to stop the flooding. Now they have accelerated the works. It’s running behind events, which is very typical here, it’s how the mentality of the authorities works,” says Triantafillou. Now, in the mountains, next to the landslides that are seen as open wounds, these constructions have appeared that not everyone sees with good eyes.
“In terms of climate change adaptation, we are seeing that we have projects of what we call gray infrastructure. We talk about projects whose objective is to reduce the impact of, for example, a flood. But we are doing it in a way that today is considered old-fashioned. We don’t emphasize nature-based solutions. For example, instead of reinforcing river estuaries, river mouths or river banks, we build gray infrastructure with concrete to regulate the river flow,” says Kostis Grimanis, Climate and Energy campaign manager at Greenpeace Greece. After the fires, the organization conducted dozens of interviews with neighbors to understand how their lives had changed after the fires. Some have lost their jobs, others received assistance that is not enough. But what they all said was that they wanted work to be done to regenerate the forest, so that their children could make a living from the same activities that have been going on in Euboea for decades.
And yet Grimanis is pessimistic: “In all honesty, I’m not at all sure that we won’t see the same fires again in 2024 as well.”
Meteorologist Kostas Lagouvardos, Research Director of the National Observatory of Athens, also warns about what may happen in the near future, recalling that the fires of 2021 and 2023 were also the result of prolonged heat waves. “We know they will be more frequent and longer in the future,” he explains. “But before we look at forecasts for the next few years, we should look at what has happened in the last 30: the temperature has risen by 1.5 degrees, and in some parts of northern Greece, by as much as two. That’s a big difference in a short period of time. And it’s not a scenario, it’s the real situation,” says the expert, who adds: “But I don’t get the feeling that in Greece or Spain or Portugal the politicians are really worried. I say really, not in words.
The residents of Eubea are also asking for facts, after two and a half years in which they experienced the worst fires and the worst floods. Alexiou is clear: “We had a paradise that turned into a hell. Logic says that we should be better prepared, also for floods. We can’t afford to go through the same thing again, we can’t afford new fires.”
