Greek opposition leader Nikos Androulakis has called for a new doctrine in national civil protection after visiting communities devastated by wildfires in West Attica.
Speaking during an inspection of Porto Germeno, a coastal village hard hit by the flames, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement president said emergency preparedness must not remain mere words while disaster prevention stays on paper.
Androulakis was briefed on the extent of the damage by local residents and the president of the Porto Germeno community during his tour of the affected zone.
Questions over state preparedness
The opposition leader raised a series of sharp questions regarding the state response and the management of public funds intended for disaster prevention.
Androulakis said his party was not seeking to fight rearguard political battles over biblical disasters, but insisted that taxpayers deserved answers about forest management and equipment levels.
He questioned whether funds spent by the state on forest clearing had produced tangible results, whether local municipalities had received adequate resources, and whether the AEGIS civil protection program was being properly utilized.
AEGIS is Greece's flagship civil protection procurement initiative, launched to upgrade firefighting aircraft, warning systems, and emergency response infrastructure. Androulakis also asked whether critical civil protection projects had been quietly removed from funding under the European Union Recovery Fund, the bloc's post-pandemic resilience facility.
Widespread fire damage
Reflecting on the scale of the disaster, Androulakis noted that a vital green lung of forest had been destroyed, alongside homes and private property, while human lives had been lost.
He urged the Greek government to provide immediate support to victims by distributing initial relief payments without delay and ensuring full compensation for all losses.
Official data indicates that the wildfire scorched a total of 111,000 stremmata across the regional units of Boeotia and Attica. About 46,000 stremmata of the burned terrain was pure forest land.
The vast majority of the damage was concentrated in Attica, where approximately 95,000 stremmata were burned. In Greece, one stremma is equal to 1,000 square meters, or 0.1 hectares, putting the total affected area at 11,100 hectares.
