Name: Greece wildfires brought under control, says fire service | BBC News
Uploaded: 2024-08-14T13:12:58.000Z
Duration: 3 min 35 s
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Next to Greece, and you may well have seen the images of those wildfires that have been threatening the capital, Athens.

Well, the good news is authorities say they've been brought under control.

At least one person died, dozens injured, thousands of others had to leave their homes.

Greek media reporting more than 100 buildings have been damaged around the capital.

Officials also said that less than 10% of the burnt areas were forests.

Let's speak to our correspondent, Azadeh Mashiri, who's in a suburb of Athens.

Hi Azadeh, just talk us through where you are first of all.

Well Lewis, today is all about assessing the damage and obviously you can see some of that around me.

Now this is a suburb of Athens because this year the wildfires have come to the capital and if you look behind me you'll notice that there's a collapsed basketball hoop.

This was a basketball court before the fires came here and over here are stands where rows of children would come to watch their friends play.

Now a staff member told me about 500 children used to come here every day and if you look at the pictures, the photos of what this used to look like beforehand, you can see the scale of the damage.

I can see the sky above me, I shouldn't be able to do that but the rooftop was the very first thing that caught fire.

Now I've also seen helicopters fly over dowsing the land with water because there is this concern that there could still be flare-ups but what the government is particularly focused on is how to help communities like this, these people who've lost businesses like this, rebuild and so 4.7 million euros has been allocated to that effort.

We know that nearly 650 people were offered temporary housing since Sunday, people who were at risk and who were affected by these fires and yet of course no matter how much help they receive, it'll be a long time before businesses like this can get up and running again.

And Azadeh, just talk us through the background here because this is a part of the world that is used to very hot conditions at certain times of years.

What has been the trends, what has been happening over the years?

I was here last year when they hit the islands as well when roads in particular sent hundreds of tourists fleeing from their hotel rooms as the fires approached all their accommodation and of course six years ago there was a devastating summer where more than a hundred people were killed in the seaside town of Mati where the fires consumed homes, cars, people were even killed as they were trying to swim away to safety and so yes none of this is uncommon to Greece but the temperatures have been rising.

It's been the hottest July, June and July on record and what scientists say is that these sorts of conditions, the dry heat, the winds, these are what are contributing to these wildfires and that global warming, climate change could be contributing to the severity and the frequency of these fires and if you speak to people in Greece, residents themselves, they say these temperatures, the way that they have to live their summers, they say it's not normal.