Greece wildfire declared largest ever recorded in EU
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/greece-wildfire-declared-largest-ever-recorded-in-eu
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/29/greece-wildfire-declared-largest-ever-recorded-in-eu
Largest ever reported...so far. But hey Greece hired thousands of cops and priests in the last few years, so that when people protest in the streets there's enough cops to beat them to a pulp and when people die there's enough priests to do the funerals
Largest since 2000 when they started tracking these things in an integrated way across the EU. Not the largest in european history or anything like that. It's only 810 km², which seems small...
Context: On a global scale the Greek fire is trivial. Canada has had 150,000 km² burn this year -- multiple orders of magnitude worse (the area burned is larger than the entire country of Greece...). The Greek fire is notable on a regional scale, and it likely sucks for those involved. But it's sort of missing the elephant in the room on a global scale.
Furthermore, who was tracking European fires prior to 2000? There's got to be some database that's been compiled about historical fires to put this in context. Wikipedia has good compilations of fire info for north america, but nothing useful for Europe...
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A forest blaze in Greece is the largest wildfire ever recorded in the EU and the bloc is mobilising nearly half its firefighting air wing to tackle it, a European Commission spokesperson has said.
Eleven planes and a helicopter from the EU fleet have been sent to help extinguish the fire north of the city of Alexandroupoli, along with 407 firefighters, Balazs Ujvari said on Tuesday.
“This wildfire is the largest in the EU since 2000, when the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis) began recording data,” the service said.
Greece’s fire service said the blaze was “still out of control” in the north-east region’s Dadia national park, a vital sanctuary for birds of prey.
Since it began on 19 August, the blaze has killed 20 people, 18 of them migrants whose bodies were found in a region that is often used as an entry point from neighbouring Turkey.
The EU calls on a fleet of 28 aircraft – 24 water-dumping planes and four helicopters – supplied by member countries to help battle blazes in the bloc and in neighbouring territories.
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