Two die in boiler explosion
Two people burnt to death and another two were severely injured in a northern Greek village yesterday when the boiler for a new house’s heating system exploded during refueling. Yiannis Savvidis, 39, the driver of the petrol truck that was filling the house’s fuel tank, died instantly in the conflagration, as did Eleni Yerman, 45, who lived in the newly built house on a workers’ housing estate at Kato Nevrokopi, a village north of Drama in eastern Macedonia. Another two residents, Sofia Karagiaouridou, 34, and Zoi Besmeli, 31, were hospitalized in Thessaloniki with severe burns. The Kato Nevrokopi estate was completed a few months ago and is still largely uninhabited, as many houses have not yet been connected to the power grid. Firemen who put out the blaze said the explosion was probably caused by an assembly fault in the boiler, which produced the spark that ignited the petrol. Kato Nevrokopi, built close to the Bulgarian border, is notorious for its cold winters, when snowdrifts regularly cut off the village from the outside world.
