Thursday, 30 August 2007
Day 5 wild fires in Greece
Day 5 in the villages around the epicentre of the wild fires near Ancient Olympia and whilst fires are still breaking out and firemen continue to do battle with unforgiving elements the cost to the lives of villagers throughout the region is now beginning to be counted. The worst affected are the elderly most of whom get by on a paltry 200 euros a month from their pensions. Many have been burned out of their homes and are now either sleeping in the charred remains of their tiny houses or in their open yards. Most of their livestock have been burned and for those that survived they have nothing to feed them with. The landscape is barren. Trees that stood over 30 metres now reduced to blackened stumps. Their branches are now ashes that waft in the atmosphere and swirl in eddies of wind. The disaster both to the people and to the environment is huge. The scale cannot be described in words or pictures. From one horizon to the other from mountain to mountain and valley to valley the only view that greets the eye is of a black and charred waste land. As one old man told me.. "All our beautiful trees are gone and now in my old age I havent even got a shady tree to sit under and rest"
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1 comments:
Your photos speak for themselves G. Horror and tragedy are in their element. And the old man's comment at the end of your article just tore at my heart.
The last 5 days has felt like the country was at war. In a way it was. Fighting for it's very survival. You're right about the damage being huge to the environment too. I heard an expert from the WWF talking the other day on the tv and he was being asked how soon we can expect to see the forests growing back, if at all and what the damage is. He said that the forests that were burnt at high altitudes will most probably never grow back to what they were. Autumn and winter are just around the corner and the rain will drive everthing down the mountains leaving them barren. The forests in the lowlands however, should grow back relatively quickly. That being said the loss to wildlife is immeasurable and surely there will be certain species of animals and flora that will be lost forever. What more can one say after that.
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