Flooding hits central Greece again

Central Greece has been hit by flooding for the second time in the space of 20 days.

This time, the damage was confined to the city of Volos and the surrounding area and on the northern part of the nearby island of Evia, Greece’s second largest.

And the weather conditions may have contributed to the downing of a private helicopter in Volos, killing the pilot and a passenger.

Northern Evia has been vulnerable to flooding since wildfires devastated that part of the island in August 2021. But, while there has been damage, it was contained by the building of many small dams to prevent landslides, forestry officials said Thursday.

The bad news is that many of those dams, especially those built in areas where many small rivers flow, which were supposed to contain mud for years, are now filled to the brim and may not last through another storm like Thursday’s, the same officials said.

In Volos, flood-stricken residents were angry that the previous storm’s debris had not been cleared from the creeks running through the city and its suburbs, leading to more flooding yesterday.

“If no work is done, we will have this thing with every significant rain,” resident Despina Tseliou told Kathimerini. During the first flood, in early September, Tseliou had been isolated in a village on Mt Pelion, where, in places, about 800 millimeters (31.5 inches) of rain fell in a single day, about twice the amount that Athens receives in a year.

When she returned to Volos two weeks ago, the city still had no water. When water returned, authorities warned that the water was too dangerous to drink.

“It smelled bad as it was flowing from the tap. We used bottled water even to take a bath,” Tseliou said.

The new flooding has left Volos without water again and most of the city has no electricity either. In many places, roads are damaged and some cars were washed away.

“The situation wasn’t just handled in an amateur way,” city resident Pantos Pinakas told The Associated Press. “It was handled in a way [that was] extremely dangerous and reprehensible.”

In Thursday’s meeting of the ruling New Democracy party’s parliamentary group, local MP blasted the government’s and regional officials’ response and called for the swift distribution of aid for damages suffered in the earlier flood.