Massive wildfires tore across four European countries this week, driving more than 480 tourists from a Greek beach by sea and displacing thousands more from Croatia to western Germany.
On the Halkidiki peninsula south of Thessaloniki, Greece, a fire front stretched roughly three kilometers, nearly two miles, and reached heights of 30 meters, according to Greek public television network ERT. More than 200 firefighters battled the blaze as it bore down on the popular resort towns of Siviri and Fourka, where Greece's civil protection agency sent evacuation warnings by phone to residents and vacationers. Two firefighters were injured and hospitalized.
The flames came so close to the shoreline that a ground evacuation was impossible. A Greek fire service spokesman said crews had to pull people out by sea. Roughly 200 of the evacuees were ferried to a ship waiting offshore, while dozens more lined up on a pontoon at Fourka, trying to escape. Traffic jams clogged the roads for those who attempted to leave by car.
Sophia, a homeowner in the Halkidiki region who spoke to AFP by phone during the chaos, described the scene in stark terms:
"We are on the beach and looking for a way to get away. From where we are, we can see that flames have reached the town and the houses."
Greek authorities issued a maximum level-five fire alert, the highest possible, for much of the mainland and banned the public from entering the peninsula's pine forests. Weather forecasters warned that winds could reach 100 kilometers per hour, roughly 60 miles per hour, on Friday, raising the risk of flare-ups even after the regional civil protection chief said the blaze had been brought under control.
Along the Croatian Adriatic, an inferno at the small tourist town of Lokva Rogoznica forced at least 1,000 displaced people into a sports hall in the nearby city of Omis, south of Split. The coastal road through Lokva Rogoznica was shut down, and traffic on the Adriatic Highway ground to a halt as long queues of vehicles crawled toward safety. More than 150 firefighters were on the ground, with four Canadair water-bombing aircraft on standby but unable to fly after dark.
Omis deputy mayor Ivan Pivcevic told the regional newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija that strong winds had driven the fire's rapid spread. Split regional governor Blazenko Boban told state news agency HINA that some people had suffered burns, though the exact number and severity were not specified.
Croatian fire chief Slavko Tucakovic called the situation "extremely worrying" in remarks to state broadcaster HRT and said firefighters faced "a difficult night ahead." He called in reinforcement teams from other parts of the country, the Daily Mail reported, citing a statement posted on the Croatian firefighting association's Facebook page.
Earlier on Thursday, firefighters backed by Canadair aircraft had managed to bring a separate wildfire on the island of Brac, off the coast near Split, under control. But the Lokva Rogoznica blaze showed no sign of relenting.
In southwestern France, a wildfire consumed 600 hectares of the Landes forest, a vast pine woodland. Authorities deployed 280 firefighters, 40 forest fire units, eight aircraft, including two Dash 8s, four Canadairs, and two Air Tractors, along with 45 military-grade police officers. Roughly 400 people were evacuated from the area.
Temperatures in the nearby towns of Morcenx-la-Nouvelle and Mont-de-Marsan had exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and the Landes region was under an orange heatwave warning. Landes department authorities issued a blunt assessment: "The situation is unfavourable."
Colonel Romain Moutard of the Landes Fire and Rescue Service delivered worse news on Thursday evening:
"The wind has completely shifted; it is now heading towards the town of Luglon."
The Landes fire was not France's only front. On the Pas-de-Calais coast in the north, a separate blaze near the towns of Neufchatel-Hardelot and Dannes burned through 180 hectares, destroyed at least one house, and injured three firefighters. The Pas-de-Calais prefecture announced Thursday evening that those fires were "contained" but still "not under control."
France had already endured a devastating fire season. At the end of July, a blaze near the Atlantic coastal town of Biscarrosse destroyed 3,700 hectares of forest and 200 houses and buildings.
In western Germany, officials in the Hürtgenwald municipality of North Rhine-Westphalia, near the Belgian border, issued an evacuation order at 4 a.m. for the village of Gey. Approximately 1,800 residents were told to leave immediately and report to an assistance center set up at a primary school in the neighboring village of Strass. The fire had burned roughly 25 hectares, about 62 acres, of woodland, and the main road through the area, the B399, was closed.
German weather officials said large swathes of the country were contending with dry conditions and elevated forest fire risk, though the specific cause of the Gey fire was not disclosed.
The Halkidiki fire came against a grim backdrop in Greece. Earlier in August, two helicopter crew members died near Athens when their aircraft collided mid-air with another helicopter while fighting a forest fire. That blaze alone destroyed 110 square kilometers, roughly 42 square miles, of forest.
Across all four countries, the pattern was the same: dried-out vegetation left behind by winter rainfall, scorched further by prolonged heatwaves, then ignited and driven by shifting, powerful winds. Pine forests, dominant in both the Greek peninsula and the French Landes region, acted as accelerants. None of the reports identified a specific ignition cause, arson, lightning, or accident, for any of the current fires. No civilian fatalities were reported in the active blazes, though burns, injuries, and massive property losses mounted.
The causes of individual fires remain unclear. But the consequences are plain enough: thousands of ordinary people, tourists on vacation, families asleep at 4 a.m., firefighters working through the night, left to cope with conditions that the governments and institutions around them could not prevent and struggled to contain. Accountability starts with asking whether the resources, the preparedness, and the response matched the scale of the threat. On the evidence so far, the answer is not reassuring.
