The Mayor of Chalandri, Simos Roussos, was blamed for the lack of organization in the huge fire that started on Sunday from Varnavas and reached his municipality, where he and volunteers stopped it, but unfortunately one worker lost her life.
“You know what the easy ball is? Have 700 firefighters and 50,000 police officers. This is the easy ball. Civil Protection should not exist, organized as a state institution, under the responsibility of a ministry, with its employees, with its means and with those with permanent employees, with training. That doesn’t exist. There is a ministry which has nothing underneath. There is no vertical mechanism, hierarchically structured, which deals with things in an organized way, which includes permanent staff, employees, water carriers, airplanes, etc. Unfortunately, there is no single structure in this thing” he said speaking on the First Program of of Hellenic Radio, Simos Roussos.
“And in KEDE they have repeatedly expressed that these issues cannot be handled, let’s say with contractors, they cannot be handled by the municipalities. It needs a state structure, which, let’s say in a hierarchical way, does it. The other solution is to grant them to all the Municipalities or to the Regions, to give the money, to give the permanent staff, to give the means and to structure the issue of civil protection at the local level. Or one way or the other to pull accepted. At the moment we are not following any path.”
Simos Roussos
“What is happening in the area is a situation where the human soul is blackened by seeing a forest burned and houses in this forest with bigger or smaller or even total destruction, more than 10 houses and maybe more than 10-12 businesses , mainly in the area of the cemetery, the part outside the plan which was also the most difficult part since in this part of the cemetery there were a lot of storage areas, companies with building materials, with paints, with propane, with cars, with LPG and many still,” said the Mayor of Chalandri, describing the damage in his area.
He further stated that “everything went wrong. Because if a fire is not extinguished at the beginning and in the first hours afterwards the fire does not catch. Until 12 o’clock at noon, we thought that the fire – according to the announcements of the Civil Protection – was going towards Kallitechnoupoli, from that side. There was a resurgence in Nea Penteli and it crossed Pentelis avenue – for those who know the area, that is from the side of the Monastery, it crossed Pentelis avenue and fell into the Nea Penteli ravine, where it was only a matter of time before it came to Chalandri (…)”.
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