Iran Press/ Europe: The country’s fire brigade is battling 209 new fire outbreaks that have sprung up over the past three days, officials said Wednesday, with very high fire risks throughout the country and fires blazing near Athens and in the city of Alexandroupolis near the Turkish border, among other regions and the surrounding areas.
Twenty people have died in the wildfires, according to Reuters, after officials recovered 18 bodies on Tuesday, believed to be migrants who came into the country through Turkey.
The fires are expected to spread further on Wednesday as winds pick up, Bloomberg reports, aided by extreme heat as the country faces temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius.
Widespread evacuations have been ordered throughout the country, including overnight orders to evacuate multiple nursing homes and a migrant detention center, according to Agence France-Presse.
Wildfires are also now spreading in neighboring Turkey, with Euronews reporting 1,200 people have been ordered to evacuate and the country briefly forced to stop shipping traffic on Tuesday due to wildfires in the city of Çanakkale.
Other European countries have lent firefighters and equipment to help handle the Greek wildfires, officials noted Wednesday, including Sweden, Germany, Romania and Cyprus.
99,000 acres of land were burned by wildfires in Greece just from August 19 to 21, according to data from the National Observatory of Athens cited by AFP.
Greece’s recent wildfires comes after the country already battled significant wildfires in July. Extreme heat and dry conditions, have resulted in wildfires spreading throughout the European continent, including in Italy, Algeria and Tunisia. Wildfires have caused widespread destruction worldwide in recent months, including wildfires in Canada that spread significant smoke down to the U.S. and the recent devastation on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and the blazes have been linked to the increasing impacts of climate change.
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