Hundreds of people, many of them tourists, were evacuated from their homes and hotels on the Greek island of Crete on Thursday as firefighters struggled to control a wildfire in arid conditions.
Greece, like much of southern Europe, is experiencing a heat wave that has created the hot and dry conditions that exacerbate wildfires.
More than 200 firefighters battled the blaze on several fronts, but their work was made more difficult by gale-force winds and rugged mountain terrain, Vassilis Vathrakoyiannis, Greece’s fire service spokesman, said during a news conference.
As the fire spread overnight and into Thursday morning, the island’s authorities, including members of the coast guard, hustled to evacuate 1,500 people.
Most of them, about 1,200, were tourists, said Manolis Frangoulis, the mayor of Ierapetra, a city on the southwest coast of the island. There were no reports of injuries or deaths.
“It was like hell on earth,” the mayor said. “There were thousands of patches of fire, springing up everywhere, each time the wind blew and threw blazing pine cones this way and that.”
Lynsey Chutel is a Times reporter based in London who covers breaking news in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Niki Kitsantonis is a freelance correspondent for The Times based in Athens. She has been writing about Greece for 20 years, including more than a decade of coverage for The Times.
The post Tourists Evacuated as Firefighters Battle Crete Blaze appeared first on New York Times.
