Alarm over dead fish in Athens’s Kifissos River

Regional and municipal environmental officials on Thursday collected samples of water from the Kifissos River after residents of Nea Philadelphia, in northeastern Athens, alerted them to the presence of thousands of dead fish and other aquatic life.

Residents spotted the dead fish on Wednesday. “I’ve never seen so many fish in my life,” resident Chrysanthi Georgiou told Kathimerini. “We saw them flopping about in the water, as if they were suffocating,” she said, adding that within an hour the river had filled with dead fish, eels and aquatic turtles.

There are concerns among residents of Nea Philadelphia and beyond that the sudden death of river life in the Kifissos could have been prompted by the dumping of toxic waste.