Fire ravages the island of Skyros as heat, high winds fuel blazes across the country
A wildfire that scorched at least 600 hectares of dense pine forest on the Aegean island of Skyros Saturday had been brought under control by yesterday afternoon. The fire, which broke out on Saturday morning in the area of Trahi, near the island’s airport, did not threaten residential areas. A contingent of 65 firefighters brought in from Athens and Thessaloniki was still on the alert on the island yesterday, assisted by firefighting aircrafts, as winds reached up to 7 on the Beaufort scale. A fire at Kandyli, Megara, west of Athens, was also brought under control yesterday, but efforts were still under way to extinguish other blazes in an inaccessible forested area near Kalentzi, Corinth, and in Kapareli, Thebes. At another spot near the village of Plataies in Viotia, central Greece, firefighters managed to bring under partial control a blaze which had been threatening the village itself. Fires in Salamina and Sparta had been partially extinguished by late yesterday. A blaze that broke out on pasture land near a major power plant near Megalopoli in the Peloponnese over the weekend was also brought quickly under control yesterday by forces on the ground, assisted by two aircraft. Finally, over 8 hectares of scrubland went up in flames near the village of Melissa, Xanthi, in the far north, before being brought under control. In a related development yesterday, two men, aged 56 and 30, were arrested in Lefkopetra, in the northern Greek prefecture of Veria, and charged with setting fire to local forestland.
