The bodies of 18 people have been found in an area of north-east Greece where firefighters are battling a major wildfire, authorities have said, as a record-breaking late summer heatwave continues to sear swathes of continental Europe.
Hundreds of firefighters were struggling on Tuesday to contain dozens of outbreaks, including several that have burned out of control for days and forced widespread evacuations, in the second deadly wave of blazes in Greece in a month.
The bodies were found near a shack in the Avanta area north of the city of Alexandroupolis near Greece’s borders with Turkey and Bulgaria, authorities said, and a disaster victim identification team was working to identify them.
A fire service spokesperson, Ioannis Artopios, said that since no reports of missing people had been filed in the area, where a major forest fire has been burning for four days, it was possible the victims were migrants who had entered from Turkey.
The discovery brings the overall toll from this week’s fires in Greece to 20, after the body of another person thought to be a migrant was found in the same area on Monday and an elderly shepherd was found dead at the site of a blaze north of Athens.
Local media described a “massive wall of flames” racing through forests towards Alexandroupolis overnight, prompting authorities to evacuate another eight villages on top of the dozen whose inhabitants had already been ordered to leave.
The port city’s hospital was also closed and its more than 100 patients evacuated to a ferry and other hospitals in northern Greece. The deputy health minister, Dimitris Vartzopoulos, said airborne smoke and ash were the main reason for the closure.
Also in the north-east, fires were burning around the city of Kavala and in the Evros border region. The islands of Evia and Kythnos, and the Boeotia region north of Athens, were also ablaze, with gale-force winds and temperatures of up to 41C (106F) creating a fire risk that civil protection officials described as extreme.
“It’s a similar situation to July,” a fire department spokesperson told Agence France-Presse, referring to a wave of forest fires in several parts of Greece last month that left five people dead. More than 60 fires had erupted in the last 24 hours, officials said.
At least two of the new blazes – one at a landfill site in an industrial zone and another in the foothills of Mount Parnitha – were dangerously close to the capital, prompting authorities to close part of the Athens ring road and advise people to stay inside.
Authorities have also banned public access to mountains and forests in fire-affected regions until at least Wednesday morning, and ordered regular military patrols. A fire last month destroyed almost 17,770 hectares (more than 43,000 acres) in 10 days in the south of Rhodes, a popular tourist island in the south-eastern Aegean.
Cyprus, Romania, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Germany and Serbia had despatched about 120 firefighters via the EU’s civil protection mechanism to help battle the flames, the fire service said.
Elsewhere in Europe, authorities evacuated 700 people from homes and a campsite on the Italian island of Elba after a fire broke out late on Monday. Two aircraft were helping to douse the blaze, which consumed five hectares on the holiday island.
Firefighters in Spain were gaining the upper hand in their battle against a wildfire raging for a week on Tenerife that has forced 12,000 people to evacuate and burned through about 15,000 hectares – 7% of the popular Canary island’s surface area.
Officials said cooler overnight temperatures and weaker winds were helping. “This has not ended, but we are starting to see the end of the tunnel,” the archipelago’s head of emergencies, Manuel Miranda, said on Tuesday.
Local authorities in France have urged mountaineers preparing to tackle Mont Blanc to delay scaling the summit of western Europe’s highest mountain because of the heatwave, during which temperatures have climbed above 42C.
Authorities in the Haute-Savoie region said there were higher-than-usual risks of rockfalls as new crevices opened up on the mountain’s glaciers. Four of the country’s 96 departments are under a maximum red extreme heat alert, with 15 more to follow on Wednesday.
The French and Swiss Alps are at the epicentre of a late summer “heat dome”, a stable high-pressure weather system that has trapped warm air over a large area of southern Europe, producing all-time record temperatures in some areas.
Scientists have said extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts and floods will become more frequent, more intense and longer-lasting because of human-induced climate change.
