Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Greece’s Kefalonia fires had made it unsafe for even dozens of aircraft to fly, after two firefighting helicopters collided west of Athens on Sunday. One crew member was rescued soon after the crash, and search and rescue teams kept looking for the other crew member.
“When the winds blow with such force, even the dozens of aircraft we have at our disposal cannot operate safely,” Mitsotakis posted during the wildfire response. The collision came while more than 500 firefighters and forest commandos were already deployed near Athens and flames were pressing toward settlements on the city’s western fringes.
Evangelos Tournas on wind limits
Evangelos Tournas said at the weekend that the fire department had been “pushed to its limits.” He added that the winds created “extremely difficult conditions resulting in many cases where aircraft either cannot draw water or cannot carry out drops due to extreme turbulence.”
That constraint was not theoretical. The helicopters collided west of the Greek capital in gale-force winds, and the response immediately shifted from firefighting to rescue operations for the missing crew member.
Porto Germeno homes destroyed
The fire emergency was already expanding before the collision. More than 100 homes were destroyed overnight in fires around Porto Germeno, and the blazes affected areas from Crete to the southern Peloponnese, Cephalonia and islands across the Aegean.
Last week, three Greek firefighters died from injuries sustained while they fought blazes. For crews on the ground and in the air, Sunday’s collision added another urgent task to a response already stretched across multiple fronts.
The missing crew member remained the focus after the rescue of the Bell helicopter crew member. The immediate next step was the search operation west of Athens, where wind and fire conditions had already limited what aircraft could safely do.
Athens and Porto Germeno
The collision turned a large wildfire response into a rescue effort in the same stretch of ground where homes were already burning and aircraft were being pushed out of the air by the weather. The missing crew member was still being sought as the firefighting operation continued under those conditions.
