On Friday, Emile Frisch spoke to RTL on the phone to detail his experience with the Greece fires. "Yesterday we saw black clouds of smoke," he explained. Due to his proximity to Thessaloniki airport and flight routes, he has observed the near-constant deployment of fire fighting aircraft over the last few days.
Frisch knows one of 300 residents in the Siviri area who had to be evacuated due to the fires. He says his friend Kosta's daughter, who purchased a house in Fourka before the summer, had to be evacuated by inflatable boat to Thessaloniki. Only the four walls of her property remain.
Despite the fires, the general atmosphere is surprisingly "not bad", Frisch says. However, residents are worried that there are insufficient fire fighters or that the fire brigades are taking too long to attend incidents. In Frisch's village, a house caught fire in January of last year and it would still be standing now if the fire brigade hadn't taken 45 minutes to reach them.
The only support locally comes from a young farmer in the village, who can pull a 500 litre tank with his pick-up truck. This is fine for watering a field, says Frisch, but won't be enough to put out fires.
