There is currently no plan regarding the distribution of aid packages to people displaced by the wildfire which tore through the Limassol district, local mayors said on Tuesday.
Kourion mayor Pantelis Georgiou told newspaper Phileleftheros that teams working for his municipality are still “waiting for instructions from the civil defence” regarding the distribution of aid.
“We do not have anything clear yet,” he said, despite the fact that much of what has been collected has been ready since last week.
“On Friday and Saturday, we had a large number of volunteers who helped to separate the items. We prepared boxes with dry food, cleaning products, personal hygiene items and more, so that they could be sent to families,” he said.
He added that food had begun to arrive as early as Thursday, but that five days on, little has yet been done about it.
“I asked the civil defence officials about the protocol, but I did not receive any answer. The situation is going back and forth, without anyone clarifying what exactly the case is,” he said.
He added that local authorities have themselves been preparing packages and sending them to areas which were impacted by the fires, as well as to places where people displaced by them are being hosted, but lamented the lack of coordination on the matter from the central government.
“There should have been an organised process and a timetable for what should have been distributed, when it should have been distributed and how it should have been distributed,” he said.
He also said some people had been attempting to make multiple trips to take supplies from where they had been gathered for themselves.
“There has been an increase in disorder. Some people come again and again and again. For this reason, we have temporarily closed the aid centre and are awaiting clear instructions. Essentially, the management of this should be in the hands of the civil defence,” he said.
Meanwhile, Polemidia mayor Andros Theodorou said his municipality’s aid collection centre has been moved to a primary school due to the large amount of aid received.
“Huge quantities have been collected, not only in our municipality, but elsewhere. At the moment, we are not accepting any more aid. We are awaiting instructions from the mukhtars to find out what their needs are. The mukhtars told us their villages are full,” he said.
He added that more than 100 aid packages have been sent to people who lost their homes in the village of Lofou and that “we are awaiting to see what other needs arise so as to be able to distribute them”.
Additionally, he also said there has been no planning or coordination over the matter put forward by the civil defence.
“If, in the coming days, it is determined that needs have been met, we will distribute the items ourselves to families in need. The clothing which has been collected is a lot – over 100 boxes. It will be distributed with the help of the red cross,” he said.
The interior ministry moved to defend the civil defence’s actions later on Tuesday afternoon, with ministry sources telling the Cyprus Mail that large quantities of unused aid are gathering at municipal facilities not because of a lack of coordination on the civil defence’s part, but because of the large amounts of products being delivered.
“People keep coming and delivering things, and, in short, we just have too much stuff – more than what is required – and a good proportion of what has been sent is actually unusable,” the sources said.
They added that many people have delivered clothes which are “damaged or worn out and should really be thrown away or be sent for recycling” rather than offered up as aid for people displaced by wildfires.
In addition, they said, “one woman arrived yesterday with 600 portions of cooked food”.
“It was hot, cooked food and all of a sudden, they would have been expected to somehow deliver and distribute all of it, when the civil defence has its own programme to cook and deliver food for volunteers, firefighters, its own members and displaced people. In the end, most of it went to waste and had to be thrown away,” they said.
They stressed that the civil defence is coordinating with local authorities to ensure aid gets to where it needed to be and urged the public to donate what is needed at any given time.
“In the coming days and weeks, if there is a shortage of one type of product or another, we will announce it and ask for people to donate what they can,” they said.