Greek wildfire triggers ammunition depot explosions, forces fighter jet relocation

On Thursday, a wildfire driven by powerful winds reached an ammunition storage facility in central Greece's Magnissia region, about four miles north of the Nea Anchialos air base, and the resulting explosions forced a dramatic military and civilian response across the Volos area. The depot, which held bombs and ammunition for Greek F-16 fighters, was evacuated before the blasts began. No one was injured, though the continued explosions prevented firefighting teams from getting close enough to fight the flames. The air force said the military base itself was not in immediate danger, but as a precaution, some of the F-16s stationed there took off for other air bases while the situation unfolded.

The scale of the evacuation was substantial. Twelve villages in the Volos-Nea Anchialos area were ordered cleared. The mayor of Volos, Achilleas Beos, reported that roughly eighty percent of residents had already left, and the coast guard ferried dozens more by small private boats to the city. The explosions were loud enough to be heard clearly twenty kilometers away in Volos itself, and the blasts shattered windows in houses across the surrounding area. State television showed residents and visitors from the coastal village of Anchialos, just two and a half miles from the blast site, being evacuated by sea, while others fled by car and bus.

This incident was one piece of a much larger catastrophe unfolding across Greece. On Thursday alone, firefighters battled one hundred twenty-four separate wildfires. The Volos blaze was the most dangerous of them all, burning on three fronts and forcing a section of Greece's busiest highway to close for several hours. National rail services through the area were delayed. Fire Service spokesman Ioannis Artopios acknowledged the scale of the challenge: despite their superhuman efforts, his forces could not stop the blaze. The fires were the product of three successive Mediterranean heat waves in just two weeks.

The human toll had already been severe. Five people were dead, including two firefighting pilots. Captain Christos Moulas and Lieutenant Pericles Stephanidis died during a low-altitude water drop on the island of Evia. At a ceremony held at the Defense Ministry in Athens, senior members of the armed forces paid tribute to them. Defense Minister Nikos Dendias said they had shown self-denial in the line of duty. Their funeral services were scheduled for later that Thursday in northern Greece and on Friday in Crete. The previous weekend had seen a massive evacuation of tourists from the island of Rhodes, where fires had burned for ten successive days.

The scale of the disaster was historic. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, an EU agency that analyzes satellite data, wildfire carbon emissions for July in Greece totaled over one metric megaton—double the previous record since record-keeping began twenty years ago. Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at the agency, said the observed intensity and estimated emissions showed how unusual the scale of the fires had been for July relative to two decades of data. The World Meteorological Organization and the EU climate service reported Thursday that temperatures during the first three weeks of July had set a new global heat record.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakas Mitsotakis addressed the broader context during a meeting with the country's president, Katerina Sakellaropoulou. Without doubt, he said, the climate crisis was here and affecting everyone more strongly than perhaps even scientists had warned. The crisis was not confined to Greece. Across Southern Europe, firefighters battled brush fires in Italy's southern mainland regions of Calabria and Puglia, as well as on the islands of Sicily and Sardinia. Sicily remained the focal point, with fires continuing to burn near Palermo. Meanwhile, in a stark contrast, parts of central Europe were being hit with winter conditions—subfreezing temperatures, frost, and snow in the Tatra Mountains running through Poland and Slovakia.