Cypriot aid teams dealing with flare ups in Greece, as fires rage

Firefighters and volunteers intensified their efforts early on Monday morning in Rhodes, following all-night battles with the flames.

Monday marks the seventh day of fire extinction efforts and Cyprus had sent two aircraft and a ground unit to assist firefighters in Greece last week.

Giorgos Constantinou, head of the Cypriot aid team, said flare ups in the Attiki area where the Cypriot units are, are continuing and they are on stand-by, in coordination with the Greek authorities.

Meanwhile, a Cypriot who works in a hotel in the Faliraki area, told the CyBC that in the last 48 hours the hotel had made free rooms available to four hundred foreign holidaymakers who were forced to vacate their accommodation due to the fire.

“Yesterday about three hundred of the 30,000 who have become roofless arrived and today another hundred. We have made available all empty rooms and the rest, by necessity, we have put on makeshift beds in common areas. As soon as I clock off now I will be taking water to a centre that has been set up to collect water and ice for firefighters,” he said.

There is no information on the exact numbers of Cypriot in Rhodes Director of Consular Affairs, Omiros Mavromatis, told the state broadcaster.

However, no calls for aid from Cypriots facing serious problems have been received by the ministry, Mavromatis said.

He added that the Cypriot Embassy had contacted some Cypriot nationals, who had evacuated but were in good health.

President of the travel agents association, Vassilis Stamataris, said that the Cypriots who are on vacation in Rhodes were settled in hotels far from the centre of the fire.

He advised that those who had planned a holiday in Rhodes contact their travel agent.

During Sunday night, two fire fronts moved in on the village of Asklipieio and a third to the east between Massari and Malona, ​​while flare-ups, tackled by firefighting forces, occurred in between Apollona and Platania.

The front of the fire has moved east, towards Malona and Massari, however, no residential areas are reported as threatened at the time of writing.

A total of 266 firefighters with 55 vehicles and 16 teams of firefighters on foot worked all night in extremely challenging conditions, hampered by winds of up to 5 Beaufort while temperatures are expected to remain extreme.

Firefighting forces and hundreds of volunteers are operating in Lake Gadoura and in the communities of Apollona and Laerma, where a monastery has been evacuated as a precaution.

Local authorities have declared a state of emergency in the southern part of the island and more than twenty thousand people have been removed from their homes or have left the tourist accommodation in which they were staying.