The army, fire brigade and civil protection authorities are on Thursday battling floods caused by torrential rains that have hit central Greece again, three weeks after deadly Storm Daniel.
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Since Wednesday evening, a new storm called Elias has hit mainly the city of Volos, the capital of Magnesia, the island of Euboea and the department of Fthiotida, causing floods, landslides, dam bursts, flooding of streets and houses. according to the fire department.
More than 250 people have been rescued since Wednesday by firefighters who, with support from the army, used inflatable boats and special vehicles to reach affected areas.
Due to bad weather, a two-seater private helicopter crashed off the island of Euboea late Thursday morning and the search for the passengers was underway, fire officials said.
Large parts of Volos are without power and parts of the local hospital have been flooded, but the facility remains operational.
“Our thoughts today are with Volos and Euboea,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said at a meeting with his right-wing faction in parliament.
According to the weather forecast, the storm is expected to weaken on Thursday evening, but “emergency workers remain on site,” Vassilios Vathrakoyanis, spokesman for firefighters, said on public television Ert.
With a population of around 140,000, Volos is struggling to recover from Storm Daniel in early September, which caused torrential water in Thessaly, Greece’s main agricultural production area, about 400 km north of Athens.
Volos then had no drinking water for more than two weeks and the damage to the local distribution network could not yet be completely repaired.
“Just this week the authorities completed the cleanup of the affected areas (by Storm Daniel, editor’s note),” said Eleni Konstantatou, a resident of Volos.
“Yesterday (Wednesday) it started to rain but we thought it was a light shower, we did not expect the area to be flooded again… “We are back to square one,” she laments to AFP.
Storm Daniel claimed 17 lives in Thessaly, destroyed crops and killed tens of thousands of farm animals.
After Greece, Daniel attacked Libya last week, killing at least 3,875 people.