Greek Fire Service

A wildfire is raging uncontrolled on the island of Serifos, aided by strong winds.

The fire erupted around 6 p.m. Saturday and is burning mostly low growth so far.

A court in Athens convicted five former senior firefighting and disaster response officials on Monday, over a 2018 wildfire outside the capital that killed more than 100 people.

The fire that swept through the seaside town of Mati, east of Athens, was the deadliest in the country's history. Residents and vacationers, many trapped in their cars, were killed as they tried to escape.

The former chief of the Greek Fire Service, Sotiris Terzoudis, confirmed on Thursday the testimonies of dozens of witnesses and a fire brigade expert that the former SYRIZA government knew, contrary to what it claimed, early on about the mounting death toll from the devastating wildfires in the seaside resort of Mati in eastern Attica in 2018, which claimed 104 lives.

On the 16th day of the wildfires in Evros, the primary wildfire front was located south of the village of Soufli, between Leukimis and Provatonas, according to Greek Fire Service spokesperson Ioannis Artopios. 

On Sunday morning he explained on the Greek state broadcaster ERT that the efforts are concentrated in the area south of Dadia forest. 

Two wildfires, fanned by strong winds, raged uncontrolled through coastal towns near Athens on Monday forcing residents to flee their homes and prompting the evacuation of hundreds of children from a summer camp.

Villagers were ordered to leave their homes and hundreds of children were evacuated from a summer camp as two separate wildfires fanned by strong winds damaged houses to the southeast and west of Athens on Monday, authorities said.

A woman who lost her husband and two children in the July 2018 fire in the east Attica coastal town of Mati filed a new lawsuit with the Supreme Court prosecutor's office on Tuesday.

The Greek Fire Service on Tuesday urged people with missing relatives of friends in the deadly eastern Attica fires to call the 199 hotline to provide rescuers with their names and descriptions.

Wildfires destroy some 50,000 hectares of land in Greece every year, according to a study carried out by the conservation group WWF Hellas and the National Agricultural Research Foundation. The research is based on wildfires recorded between 1983 and 2008 and concludes that there was an average of 1,465 blazes annually in that period.