Firefighters fight this Saturday, for the third consecutive day, the first major fire of 2021 in Greece. A fire that experts are already calling a “huge ecological disaster” in the area of the protected natural habitat of Geraneia, west of Athens.

The fire, which started on the coast of the Gulf of Corinth last Wednesday night, is “one of the most important in the last 20-30 years, and it has also occurred this month, very early in the season,” it has lamented the fire chief, Stefanos Kolokouris, on the television channel ANT1.

The improvement in weather conditions allowed the main front of the fire to be controlled on Friday afternoon; However, “several scattered active fires remain” this Saturday in the Geraneia mountain range, north of the Corinthian isthmus, according to firefighters..

More than 270 firefighters, supported by sixteen aircraft, continue to be deployed and assisted by the army. Firefighters remain cautious about a possible resumption of fire in these rugged mountains.

As soon as the disaster is fully controlled, the magnitude of the damage will be assessed, Civil Protection has assured, although experts and associations are already speaking of an “ecological disaster of immense magnitude”, as the newspaper Avghi has pointed out..

The dense and until now well-preserved pine forest has burned 54%, according to the same newspaper.. 6.1% of the surface of the massif belongs to the areas protected by the Natura 2000 network, which brings together natural or semi-natural areas of the European Union with exceptional flora and fauna.

For Euthymios Lekkas, professor of environmental disaster management at the University of Athens, it is also “a huge ecological disaster that will require work to prevent future landslides and terrible floods next fall.”. “The flames burned more than 55 square kilometers of pine forests,” he lamented on the public channel ERT.

So far, no casualties have been reported, but about ten houses have been damaged and destroyed.

At the site of the fire, different volunteers tried this Friday to help the injured, burned or dehydrated animals by providing them with first aid, water and food.