Andreas Dimitriou’s wife and baby son died in a Greek bushfire. Locals say it didn’t have to happen
Andreas Dimitriou’s wife and baby son died in a Greek bushfire. Locals say it didn’t have to happen
25 September 2018
Published by http://www.abc.net.au/
GREECE – Andreas Dimitriou is a professional firefighter and one of the strongest, saddest men I have ever met.
On July 23, he answered the call to fight a distant fire.
When he arrived at the station, he learned the blaze had picked up speed and was now threatening his house.
He tried to call his wife Margarita but there was no answer.
He raced back to see the streets around his home on fire.
Finally, Margarita answered and managed to say she was at the beach.
He fought his way through the flames and found her unconscious on the water’s edge.
Alongside her was their six-month-old son.
The baby was pronounced dead at hospital.
Margarita never woke from her coma and died 12 days later.
“It is something that you cannot easily endure,” he says.
“It is something you wish no person lives through, not even your enemy.”
There are no tears as he speaks. His face is a rigid mask, his voice tightly controlled. He is in the deepest shock a husband and father can suffer.
“I feel a lot of emotions, but I still have not felt anger, in the sense that I do not know who to be angry with. To be angry with God? To be angry with people? To be angry with myself? To be angry,” he said.
“I still have not felt anger because I do not know to whom to address my anger. All the other emotions I feel every day, except for anger. At least ’til now.”
Margarita and the baby son they had not yet named were among 99 confirmed victims of the world’s deadliest bushfire in nine years.
But unlike the Black Saturday fires in Victoria, Mati is not a vast bushland region. It’s a small town just 30 minutes’ drive from Athens.
Just why so many died is now the subject of fierce debate in Greece; some saying it was a climate-change-induced inferno that could not be stopped, others blaming years of austerity for running down the country’s emergency services.
Professor Costas Synolakis, a disaster response expert at the Academy of Athens, believes the main problem was something more shameful.
“There was absolutely no pre-planning,” he said.
“In Greece, there is no culture of planning for big public emergencies. Most people, including the Government, are in complete denial.
“I cannot think of a single part that went right in this disaster. One wonders that there were not more people dead.”
No warning, no evacuation
For generations, Mati was one of Greece’s most desirable seaside towns, famous for its inviting water, sandy beaches and cool pine forests.
Well-to-do Athenians built weekenders along the cliffs, often without planning permission. Hotels sprang up to cater for foreign tourists.
Greek Australians Stella and Alexis Tzaninis had no hesitation snapping up a holiday apartment last October when they were visiting from Victoria.
“The greenery attracted us,” Ms Tzaninis said.
“How green and lush it was. And how quiet it was.”
It reminded them of their home in Queenscliff on Port Phillip Bay.
On the day of the fire, Stella was back there running the family’s fish and chip shop but Alex was still in Mati, renovating their new apartment in preparation for the first extended family holiday.
At 6.26pm he noticed distant smoke and started videoing it from his balcony. Within half an hour he was surrounded by fire.
There had been no warning or call for evacuation.
Instead, he found himself trying to guide strangers through blinding smoke to the safety of the water. He’s haunted by the memories of people dying around him.
“I can hear people screaming, crying,” he said, his voice choking with emotion.
“It was shocking.”
Like many in the diaspora, Stella sat up all night watching the fire coverage on Greek channels on cable TV, horrified to see the devastation.
Now back in Mati, she is furious authorities gave no warning.
“In Australia, we would have a plan in place,” Stella said.
“There would be a text message on your phone saying: ‘The fire is at such and such, get out’. If you choose to defend your property, it’s your choice. Here they did not have that choice.”
Danger signs ignored
Authorities had long grown complacent about the risk of fire here.
While summer brush fires are common in the hills above the town, they had never crossed the Marathonas Highway to threaten the densely populated coast.
One reason is that Mati enjoys a strong onshore wind. (Mati is Greek for “eye”, as in eye of the north wind).
But for days before the tragedy, at the peak of the fire season, the bureau of meteorology forecast unusual westerly winds blowing down from the hills, putting Mati squarely in the path of any major fire.
The warnings were ignored. Not only was there no plan for evacuation. When fire started sweeping down towards the highway, police directed cars into Mati for safety.
“People who had absolutely nothing to do with Mati, who didn’t live there, they were actually diverted into harm’s way,” Professor Synolakis said.
“That made absolutely no sense.”
No escape
Once the fire leapt over Marathonas Highway there was no escape.
Mati has only two narrow access roads and they were quickly grid-locked, then blocked, by burning cars.
People’s only hope of survival was to reach the sea. But here again their way was barred.
Most of Mati is built on fenced-off cliffs with few marked paths to the sea.
Maria Dizeli, a school teacher who lives on the waterfront, pointed to flowers and a cross on the track in front of her home.
“Many people died here,” she said.
“They tried to jump. Like one girl, she tried to jump from the cliff.”
She was lucky to escape herself, dashing from her waterfront apartment through flames to a stairway that led down to a tiny beach.
She waited there for more than five hours, frantically calling the Coast Guard to send help, surrounded by terrified old people and children screaming, many of them badly burned and all choking from smoke.
In the end, a private fishing boat came to their rescue.
About 700 people were picked up during the night by a volunteer flotilla only supplemented by official vessels.
Many died of burns or drowned as they waited.
The failings of authorities verged on surreal.
While people huddled in terror on the beaches, they could see large tourist ferries from the Greek islands continuing to dock at the neighbouring port of Rafina.
The Coast Guard didn’t even stop the boats unloading cars.
“Again, a horrible mistake,” Professor Synolakis said.
“You want to have the roads as open as possible, because you want to move traffic away. You do not want to bring in more traffic from ferries that are coming in.
“Where is the Government in all of this? I mean, the number one responsibility of any Government is protecting its citizens. This is the number one responsibility. Everything else comes second. And here, the Government failed completely.”
‘It was a crime’
Within days of the fire, the Government sacked the heads of police and the fire brigade, and the Minister for Public Order resigned.
But many want the reckoning to go further.
Zoe Konstantopoulou, a former speaker of Parliament, would like some of her former colleagues jailed.
“This was a holocaust at a time of peace,” she said.
“It was not an accident. It was a crime. It is a crime demanding justice and punishment.”
Ms Konstantopoulou split from the leftist Syriza government after it buckled to pressure from the European Union and continued to implement a program of severe austerity.
For eight years, the EU and IMF have been propping up Greece’s debt-ridden economy with loans in return for cuts to public sector wages and services.
“I think it’s very, very clear that austerity measures imposed upon our country have led not just to misery and suffering, but also to deaths,” Ms Konstantopoulou said.
The national president of the firefighters’ union, Dmitris Stathopoulous says the fire brigade’s budget has been cut by 20 per cent in that time.
In his own unit, in the grounds of the 2004 Athens Olympics complex, 10 of its 15 trucks are out of action.
“When our equipment is reduced, when our vehicles are reduced we cannot then fulfil our duties there is no budget to actually replace it, we are of course in a position where we can’t respond,” he said.
However, even Mr Stathopoulous doubts extra resources could have contained the Mati fire.
It was just too strong and too fast, driven by winds of more than 100 kilometres per hour.
As to why the area wasn’t evacuated, he says there are complicated and time-consuming rules as to who can make and implement that decision.
“Unfortunately, the law in Greece states that the operations commander makes the recommendation to the local mayors. We do not give the order, we make the recommendation.”
Evangelous Bournous, one of those local mayors, says the fire brigade was “exclusively responsible”.
“The fire brigade is the competent authority to issue the order to evacuate the area. It did not. From the beginning, they underestimated the fire.”
Returning to the front line
The fire has shaken confidence in the state just as the Government was hoping to draw a line on the economic crisis.
The eight-year-loan program formally ended last month.
Government ministers had been quietly suggesting the worst was over.
In the shattered community of Mati, people hope the fire could finally be the catharsis to end government dysfunction.
Stella Tzaninis is impatient for the simple fire-safety measures she’s grown used to in Victoria.
But first the nation’s leaders have to agree who is responsible.
“This has been going on for years,” she said.
“And it’s just the blame game at the moment, just the blame game. No one’s sticking their hand up and saying, ‘It’s our fault’.”
Whatever happens, it will still fall to ordinary firefighters to try to save communities, with or without the resources they need. Despite losing his family, Mr Dimitriou plans to return to the front line.
“It is a contribution, it is a vocation. It’s something that Margarita admired in me, what I do, and I will continue to do it.”
