In the Greek disaster area, rescue workers continue to try to bring people from flooded villages to safety. A total of almost 2,000 people have been rescued so far, fire department spokesman Vasilios Vathrakogiannis told news channel ERTnews on Friday.
The death toll remained at six as of Friday morning. How many people are missing remains unclear, however, because many villages are still surrounded by the water masses and cut off from the environment.
The Greek weather service Meteo published a map showing the extent of the flooding. The situation is particularly dramatic in the municipality of Karditsa, which resembles a large lake. A total of around 72,000 hectares were flooded, the meteorologists said.
Alarm in Larissa
In the early morning hours of Friday, the alarm was also raised for the city of Larisa, where the Pinios river reached a level of 9.5 meters, while it normally is around four meters, as the daily Kathimerini wrote. The fire brigade evacuated several parts of the city that would be affected by the river crossing.
The Greek weather agency EMY meanwhile declared the storm “Daniel” over on Friday. Since Monday it had settled over the central Greek region of Thessaly and lasted until Thursday. The amounts of precipitation from “Daniel” exceeded everything that Greek meteorologists had previously measured. Locally, more than 700 liters of water per square meter fell in less than 24 hours.
Helicopters were able to fly to the completely flooded villages of the Karditsa municipality for the first time on Thursday afternoon to rescue people from house roofs; before the storm was too strong. The military was also called in and penetrated inaccessible areas with armored vehicles, as reported by Greek media. The extreme weather should be over by this Friday at the latest, as forecast by meteorologists. The damage is not yet foreseeable.
In Larisa, the capital of Thessaly, after days of rain, around 80 people were surrounded by the floods for more than 24 hours without food or drinking water, as the newspaper “To Proto Thema” reported. Finally, a resident came with a tractor and trailer and brought the people to safety.
The damage is still difficult to foresee. The port city of Volos is experiencing massive infrastructure damage and is struggling with mountains of slush that the water has washed into the streets. The entire region of Thessaly is considered the “granary” of Greece, here most of the fields are sometimes meters high under water.
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