Two firefighting helicopters have collided west of Athens, killing the two-person crew of one of the aircraft, as efforts to control a massive wildfire barrelling towards the outskirts of the Greek capital intensified.
Gale-force winds that have pushed flames towards settlements on Athens’ western fringes were caught on video on Sunday downing one of the helicopters.
“The pilots … were taken unconscious to hospital, where their death was confirmed,” said the fire department’s director of communications, Vassilis Vathrakogiannis.
As Europe’s wildfire crisis fractured along different routes, and in further proof of the destructive force of climate-driven wildfires across the continent, the blazes ripped through Greece’s tinder-dry landscape, up mountain slopes and down to the sea, before encroaching on the capital.
Warning of “extremely difficult” days ahead, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, underlined the threat posed by gusts that in recent days have exceeded 78mph (125km/h).
“When the winds blow with such force, even the dozens of aircraft we have at our disposal cannot operate safely,” he wrote on social media.
More than 100 homes were destroyed overnight in fires that broke out around the popular coastal village of Porto Germeno, about 45 miles (70km) north-west of Athens. By Sunday, more than 500 firefighters and forest commandos had been dispatched to keep the flames at bay.
The eastern Mediterranean, no stranger to wildfires, has had a relatively calm summer to date, leaving Greeks to watch in horror as the blazes have hit farther west.
As the advance of wildfires in Spain was finally curbed and officials in France announced that a mega-fire – four times the size of Paris – had begun to be contained, the blazes in Greece have prompted mass evacuations and devastated huge swathes of land from Crete to the southern Peloponnese, the Ionian isle of Cephalonia and islands across the Aegean.
Last week three Greek firefighters died from injuries sustained while they fought blazes.
Extreme winds have been a blessing – in bringing down summer temperatures – but also a curse, with their-gale force strength obstructing firefighting efforts.
Greece’s civil protection minister, Evangelos Tournas, a retired air force general, said at the weekend that the fire department had been “pushed to its limits”. He said high winds had created “extremely difficult conditions resulting in many cases where aircraft either cannot draw water or cannot carry out drops due to extreme turbulence”.
France’s largest wildfire remained contained after 224,000 people were forced to flee in what may have been the largest peacetime evacuation in French history. But active pockets still burned across 160 sq miles (420 sq km) of devastated forest.
Thousands remained unable to return home, and nearly 3,000 firefighters were deployed against the Gironde mega-fire and a second blaze in Provence that had stopped advancing but remained uncontained.
“The fire is now fixed, which does not mean that the fire is extinguished,” the Gironde prefecture said on Sunday, using the French firefighting term for a blaze whose advance has been stopped and whose perimeter has been contained.
The region remained under France’s highest red forest fire alert. Dry conditions and soaring temperatures around Bordeaux, combined with afternoon winds, created a continued risk of renewed flames.
Additional firefighters from Ukraine, Lithuania and French Polynesia were expected on Sunday and Monday to reinforce the operation.
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Hundreds of miles away, nearly 1,500 firefighters were battling a separate fire in the south-eastern Var department that tore through roughly 7 sq miles in little more than a day.
Authorities said the fire in the Gros Bessillon hills was stabilised on Sunday morning, meaning its perimeter had not expanded overnight. But unlike the Gironde fire, it had not yet been declared contained.
Firefighting aircraft supported crews working to keep the flames away from villages among the vineyards, olive groves and wooded hills of the region known as Green Provence. About 2,500 people were evacuated as the fire threatened communities.
The blaze was the fourth major fire to strike the central Var since 19 July. A separate, smaller fire near Brignoles earlier in the week forced the Hollywood actor George Clooney and his family, along with about 700 other residents, to evacuate before it was brought under control.
The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said France’s wildfires were generally under control but cautioned that conditions remained highly changeable.
He announced that a national coordinator attached to the prime minister’s office would oversee reconstruction in fire-ravaged areas. More than 450 sq miles have burned across France since the beginning of the year.
Fires in France and Spain alone have driven roughly a third of a million people from homes and holiday sites, emptied communities at the height of the summer and stretched firefighters, aircraft and emergency services across simultaneous disasters.
The crisis is unfolding on the world’s fastest-warming continent. Europe has heated at more than twice the global average since the 1980s, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Higher temperatures and prolonged drought leave forests and scrubland drier and more combustible, allowing fires to spread faster and burn more intensely. Human-caused climate breakdown doubled the likelihood of the extreme fire conditions that fuelled the French blazes, scientists at World Weather Attribution calculated in a rapid analysis on Thursday while the fires were still burning.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
