Adapting to a new fire-prone reality

Valentini Papaioannou did not know what to expect as she returned to her home in Palaia Penteli, northeast of Athens, on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 13. Everything had happened so fast when she’d left it 30 hours earlier with her husband and their 2-year-old son, running away from a wildfire that had spread onto their street. In those panicked moments, she knew that the deja vu she was experiencing was inevitable: She was born and grew up in Thrakomakedones, another Athens suburb that is vulnerable to forest fires because of its location in the foothills of Mount Parnitha. Her family holiday home just a few kilometers further north in Kalamos, meanwhile, had narrowly escaped destruction by a big wildfire in 2017, and it wasn’t the first time.

“I don’t know if fires are chasing me, or I’m chasing them,” she says, only half-joking.

“What I do know is that growing up close to a mountain, I always felt out of place in the city and liked the idea of living a little bit closer to nature. It has now become abundantly clear that this comes at a cost,” she tells Kathimerini, looking out from her balcony at the scorched tips of pine trees in what was just a few days earlier a sea of green.

Valentini’s experience mirrors that of hundreds of thousands of Athenians who, theoretically at least, live in some of the capital’s most privileged suburbs, on the northern and eastern fringes of the Attica Basin. Just the municipalities of Penteli (pop. 35,610), Vrilissia (32,417) and Dionysos (42,376), which were among those hit by last week’s big wildfire, account for more than 110,000 permanent residents. That number skyrockets when we add all the suburbs in the foothills of Parnitha, Penteli and Ymittos. Within the space of a few years, their idyllic suburban lifestyle turned into a white-knuckle ride.

For the terrestrial program coordinator for the Greek branch of the eco conservation group WWF, Nicos Georgiadis, the increased vulnerability of the Athens suburbs located in mixed residential-forest zones is inevitable and something their residents and the state need to come to terms with. More importantly, it is a reason to start organizing their defense as soon as possible, and much more efficiently. This is even more important now that much of Attica’s suburban forestland has been left, by fires, practically devoid of dense tree cover, meaning that wildfires are free to develop a lot faster and spread to residential areas.

‘I always felt out of place in the city and liked the idea of living a little bit closer to nature. It has now become abundantly clear that this comes at a cost’

“The hamlets and villages that were near or inside forests grew gradually into small towns and suburbs stretching the limits of the urban fabric, often to an extreme degree. Most of the municipal authorities, however, did not keep up with this growth by developing their action plans for wildfire prevention accordingly. Some of them don’t even have a civil protection department. The protection of seriously vulnerable areas usually comes down to the individual mayor’s sense of duty,” says Georgiadis.

Therefore, he adds, “we need a very specific plan at the local government level with specific regulations regarding what needs to be done at the prevention and control level: from clearing brush and installing hydrants to setting up lookouts and managing flammable materials. We can’t keep trying to protect our settlements with a mindset that belongs in the 1990s and 2000s,” he adds.

Georgiadis notes that WWF Greece has put together a detailed blueprint establishing a standardized set of up-to-date rules for fire prevention actions at the local level that will help protect vulnerable settlements. It actually sent this blueprint to the climate crisis and civil defense minister last October, without receiving an answer.

“If municipal authorities rely exclusively on the Fire Service, we would need one fire truck for every 10 houses and would have no firefighters to put out the blaze in the forest,” he adds.

The government, meanwhile, is working on its own plan, which comprises part of the Doxiadis zoning reform program and measures that have already been implemented in the local zoning plan for Mati, the East Attica seaside town devastated by a deadly wildfire in 2018. Among other things, the government’s plans includes introducing fire protection zones of at least 10 meters in width around every municipality in Attica that abuts forestland.

For as long as she can remember, Milena Zafeiropoulou has been prepared for the possibility of having to evacuate because yet another dangerous wildfire loomed. Her ancestral home is on the border between Thrakomakedones and Varibobi, north of Athens, and was one of the first in the settlement there, built within the boundaries of the town plan in the early 1970s. Her family’s life changed in August 2021, when one of the fronts from the massive fire that had started in Varibobi came too close for comfort, stopping at their garden gate. Actually, how does one become accustomed to such a violent shift? “You simply don’t,” she says. “It took me around six months to look beyond the road on the drive to and from home.”

Processing what had happened was hard. “My thoughts moved along selfish lines in the first few hours after the fire: We survived, my family is OK, my dogs too, and the house is still standing. We were lucky; the blaze didn’t touch us. The magnitude of what had happened started sinking in the very next day. There was an eerie silence all around, interrupted only by the sirens of fire trucks rushing to extinguish a fresh conflagration. The rustling of leaves, the chirping of birds, the barks of dogs, all of nature’s familiar sounds had gone silent,” she recalls.

When did this sense of loss start to fade?

“The following May, when poppies started springing up from the ashes. It was the first sign of hope – and the first time I felt able to go out for a walk.”