Sawt Falasteen - Helicopters collide in Greece as fires spread

The hired Bell helicopters collided while battling a wildfire in the Psatha area west of Athens, the fire service said on Sunday.

"Search and rescue teams were immediately mobilised to locate and assist the crews," it said.

State broadcaster ERT reported that one crewmember had been found safe, while rescuers were searching for the second.

Television footage showed one of the helicopters explode and plunge to the ground in flames after an apparent rotor collision.

Mitsotakis earlier said Greece was experiencing "extreme weather conditions" with winds that had reached 100 kilometres (60 miles) an hour.

"When the winds blow with such force, even the dozens of aircraft we have at our disposal cannot operate safely," he wrote on Facebook.

Nearly 500 firefighters were battling blazes around the popular coastal village of Porto Germeno, 70 kilometres northwest of Athens, the fire department said.

They were attempting to keep the fire from approaching the western outskirts of Athens after it scaled a mountain overnight.

Some 100 firefighters were fighting another blaze in Aigialia in the northern Peloponnese.

A new fire broke out late Saturday on the Ionian Sea island of Cephalonia, Greece's popular holiday destination.

A 44-year-old man was arrested Sunday in Cephalonia on suspicion of deliberately starting the fire, according to the Greek news agency ANA.

The National Observatory's climate tracker meteo.gr said early estimates indicated that over 6,500 hectares (16,000 acres) had been burned in separate fires on the Gulf of Corinth which also swept Porto Germeno.

It added that meteorological conditions remained adverse "mainly due to strong northerly winds, which, however, have partially weakened compared to previous days".

-'Is anyone there?'-

Porto Germeno and other villages were evacuated when the fire broke out on Friday but local authorities say scores of homes were damaged or destroyed.

"We could not believe what we were seeing, the fire spread extremely rapidly," Nikos Georgopoulos from the laboratory of forest management at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, told state TV channel ERT.

Footage released by Greek police showed officers going door to door in the village of Agios Nektarios, near Porto Germeno, evacuating residents as a wildfire approached.

Riding motorcycles, officers sounded their sirens and knocked on every door, shouting, "Is anyone there?"

AFP images showed Greek firefighters battling flames and towering clouds of smoke, while volunteers also helped fight the blaze in the area.

Minas Tsotdanis, a farmer who lost his home in the blaze, said more than a dozen houses had been destroyed in the village.

"Even if my home had been spared, all I would see would be this: a burned forest," he told AFP on Saturday, anxiously watching the flames.

- 'Megafire' -

Earlier this week, fires on the islands of Crete and Paros affected another 6,000 hectares according to meteo.gr.

Theodore Giannaros, a wildfire meteorologist and senior researcher at the National Observatory, said the fires around Porto Germeno appeared to have affected an area of over 10,000 hectares -- almost double the original estimate.

"It is highly likely (if not almost certain) that this particular wildfire will be classified as a megafire," Giannaros wrote on Facebook.

Firefighters have faced dozens of fires daily and Greece's Civil Protection Minister Evangelos Tournas on Saturday said the fire department had been "pushed to its limits".

Gale-force winds created "extremely difficult conditions resulting in many cases where aircraft either cannot draw water or cannot carry out drops due to extreme turbulence", Tournas said.

Though the winds eased late on Saturday, the greater Athens area and nearby Voiotia and the island of Evia were under near maximum fire risk on Sunday, the civil protection ministry said.

Hit hard by the climate crisis like the rest of the Mediterranean region, Greece is plagued by wildfires every summer due to high temperatures, frequent heat waves and drought.

J.Saleh--SF-PST