Important Takeaways:
- Greece will soon set up an evacuation port on the island of Santorini to facilitate the safe escape of people in case a bigger quake hits the popular tourist destination, a Greek minister said on Monday.
- Santorini, a volcanic island in the Aegean Sea, has been shaken by tens of thousands of mild quakes since late January, forcing thousands of people to flee, and authorities to ban construction activity, and shut schools and nearby islands.
- No major damage has been reported but scientists have said the seismic activity was unprecedented even in a quake-prone country like Greece and have not ruled out bigger tremors.
- They have identified the main ferry port at the foot of a precipitous slope and other sites across Santorini as weak links, although they have not said they cannot be used in an emergency situation.
- Civil Protection Minister Vassilis Kikilias said Greece will build an evacuation port for the safe docking of passenger ferries until a new port infrastructure is in place.
- “This story is not over,” Costas Papazachos, a seismology professor, and a spokesperson for the Santorini quakes told public broadcaster ERT.
- “Both authorities and habitants should get used to a rather unpleasant situation for some time, it could be another two, three months.”
- Seismologists have said the latest seismic activity, the result of moving tectonic plates and magma, has pushed subsurface layers of the island upwards.
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Important Takeaways:
- A series of earthquakes near the Greek island of Santorini have led authorities to shut down schools, dispatch rescue teams with sniffer dogs and send instructions to residents including a request to drain their swimming pools.
- Even though earthquake experts say the more than 200 tremors that have hit the area since early Friday are not related to the volcano in Santorini, which once produced one of the biggest eruptions in human history, locals are on edge
- The strongest earthquake recorded was magnitude 4.6 at 3:55 p.m. Sunday, at a depth of 14 kilometers (9 miles), the Athens Geodynamic institute said. A few tremors of over magnitude 4 and dozens of magnitudes 3 have followed. There were no reports of damage or casualties.
- Earthquake experts and officials from the Ministry of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection and the fire service have been meeting daily and decided to close schools Monday on the island of Santorini as well as nearby Amorgos, Anafi and Ios.
- After Sunday’s meeting, they also advised residents and hotel owners in Santorini to drain their swimming pools over concerns that large volumes of water could destabilize buildings in case of a strong quake.
- Experts said it was impossible to predict whether the seismic activity could lead to a stronger tremor, but added that the area could potentially produce a 6-magnitude quake.
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ATHENS (Reuters) – Two villages on the Greek island of Evia were evacuated on Sunday as a forest fire raged, fanned by strong winds.
The fire brigade described the evacuation of Kontodespoti and Stavros village in central Evia, about 70 km (44 miles) from Athens, as a precaution.
A firefighter throws water through a hose as a wildfire burns near the village of Psahna, in Evia, Greece, August 12, 2018. REUTERS/Michalis Karagiannis
A wildfire near the capital in July killed 94 people, the country’s worst such disaster, prompting the prime minister Alexis Tsipras to replace the Civil Protection Minister and the heads of Fire Brigade and Police.
Tsipras announced the demolition of thousands of illegal buildings in response to the deaths of dozens of people who were unable to escape a maze of poorly planned streets.
(Reporting Lefteris Papadimas; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
