Greece Ablaze: Is This The Way The World Ends?

Peter Hammill:

The current affair gets to be my business,
I heard the news on the radio:
the sun on earth... what is this?
Is that the way that the crazy goes?

The Scotsman:

UP TO half of mainland Greece was in flames yesterday with firefighters battling to save the ancient site of the Olympic games and a 2,500-year-old temple of Apollo from wildfires raging through the country.

The death toll rose to at least 58 after five people were killed on the island of Evia, north of Athens, but it was feared many more may have perished in fires so large and intense they were visible from space.

New fires also broke out faster than others could be brought under control.

Officials believe that arson was responsible for many of the blazes and several people had been arrested. The government also announced a reward of up to £500,000 for anyone providing information that would lead to the arrest of an arsonist.

International Herald Tribune:

In late afternoon, [Maria Dimopoulos], 56, decided to lay down a bunch of white daisies on the spot where her cousins, Nikos and Maria Dimopoulos, the brother and sister, both in their 70s, died.

The three of them had been fleeing the fire together when a police officer stopped and urged them to get into his car. Dimopoulos did, but the other two did not want to leave their donkey, their only possession of value.

"I told you, 'Come with me!' " she said, laying the flowers down next to the dead donkey on the side of the road. "You wouldn't come. Why wouldn't you come?"

Hammill:

Attention tuned to the satellites,
looking down for an overview.
In the chapel of space we are acolytes.
In the battle of time we're all soldiers too
and the relative choir push the energy higher
Under fire.

International Herald Tribune:

The fire quickly ripped into Artemida, about three kilometers, or two kilometers, away. Residents piled into cars down the road toward Zaharo, the area's main town, on the Aegean Sea. Alexandropoulos, at the time in Zaharo, said he heard that the flames reached his village and called his mother, who was taking care of his son, Phillipos.

"I didn't even speak with her," he said. "I just said, 'I'm coming. Get going.' "

"I just didn't make it," he said.

He could not, according to several accounts, because fire swept across the road to the village, blocking off cars. Karta-Paraskevopoulos, her car full of her children and possibly others, turned around along with another car. In the smoke and confusion, there was an accident with other fleeing cars and a fire truck, which rolled over. Everyone in the convoy, several of them elderly, fled up a slope into the olive groves, where they died.

"I thought of nothing - just death," said Vassilis Mitros, 28, among a party who saw the bodies - he counted 24 - early the next morning.

Now the once-lovely hills are burnt to white ash and olive trees like blackened skeletons, planted after death. All but 14 of the 60 homes here were damaged or destroyed; in Artemida, 17 of the 70 houses were lost, though Karta-Paraskevopoulos's house was intact. The region normally produces 10,000 tons of oil, but nearly all the trees are now destroyed, along with countless livelihoods. Charred donkeys and chickens litter ruined farms.

"This village is literally wiped out," Bammi said. "It's not just those who have been killed. Those who are left have no fields to work in, no olive trees. They have nothing to look forward to."

International Herald Tribune:

A woman killed on Friday, her charred body found with her arms around her four children, might have been safe if she had stayed in her home. It was the only house left untouched by the flames in the village of Artemida in the western Peloponnese. The house's white walls and red tile roof were unscathed, surrounded by blackened earth.

Hammill

The current affair gets to be all our businness,
it's filtered in through the T.V. screen.
The norm, the average...what is this,
when it goes blank what does that all mean?
And what's the drive of each individual?
And what's the way that the story ends?
Is it Mr. X, left as the last residual
holder of the flame, conscience of all men?
But he's so tense to expire
he throws himself on the wire
under fire.

The Scotsman:

In the early hours of the morning, church bells rang out the alarm in Kolyri and residents gathered their belongings and fled through the night.

They told how the blaze had covered 1¼ miles in just three minutes.

"It's hell everywhere," said resident Costas Ladas. "I've never seen anything like it."
...

Constantine Karamanlis, the Greek prime minister, has declared the entire nation in a state of emergency and national mourning and ordered flags to fly at half staff on government buildings.

The opening of the Greek premier football league, scheduled to start yesterday, was postponed until further notice as were a number of cultural and entertainment events.

Three weeks away from a general election, the government presented the country as under attack by "suspect interests", which it would not specify.

Mr Karamanlis said: "So many fires in different places and at the same time cannot be a coincidence. This is a national tragedy."

But the opposition socialist and communist parties blamed the government for incompetence and delays in taking action.

International Herald Tribune:

Greece's few remaining patches of forest rapidly were being rapidly incinerated, and the environmental consequences will be dire, experts said.

The worst of the fires are concentrated in the mountains of the Peloponnese in the south and on the island of Evia north of Athens. Strong winds blew smoke and ash over the capital.

"This is an immense ecological disaster," said Theodota Nantsou, WWF Greece Conservation Manager. "We had an explosive mixture of very adverse weather conditions, tinder-dry forests — to an extent not seen for many years — combined with the wild winds of the past two weeks. It's a recipe to burn the whole country."

The Scotsman:

THE weather has been causing worldwide havoc.

The US states of Idaho and California have, like Greece, been hit by wildfires, while Ohio, already suffering from flooding, was hit by tornados that left hundreds of thousands with no electricity.

Meanwhile, China, India and Romania have been suffering from severe flooding.

In the US, a mandatory evacuation was ordered for residents of more than 1,000 homes south of Ketchum in Idaho where a massive wildfire raged.

And in California, a seven-week-old wildfire has been burning in Santa Barbara county and a recommended evacuation has been put into effect.

In Ohio, beleaguered residents were picking up the pieces after tornado-bearing thunderstorms knocked out power across the state.

Powerful storms during most of the past week caused disastrous floods from south-eastern Minnesota to Ohio that were blamed for at least 18 deaths.

In China, the official Xinhua News Agency yesterday reported torrential rainstorms had triggered landslides and floods, killing at least 13 people.

In India, nearly 2,000 people have been killed by snake bites, drowning, diarrhoea and in house collapses since July when swollen rivers burst their banks, inundating huge areas in eastern India and Bangladesh. The death toll rose by 74 over the weekend.

Overnight rains also caused widespread flooding in Romania, when rivers overflowed, leaving about 1,400 people stranded in villages and forcing the evacuation of the 17th-century Sambata de Sus Monastery.

Peter Hammill's monsterpiece, "Mr. X (gets tense)", in full:

The current affair gets to be my business,
I heard the news on the radio:
the sun on earth... what is this?
Is that the way that the crazy goes?

Attention tuned to the satellites,
looking down for an overview.
In the chapel of space we are acolytes.
In the battle of time we're all soldiers too
and the relative choir push the energy higher
Under fire.

The sliding show in the macroscopic,
finger on the button pointing to progress.
The apparatus roll, no-one here can stop it,
too busy learning more - always knowing less.
Soon turkey-wrapped in the spaceman blanket
we'll offer up lame duck apologies
and settle down for the final banquet,
the gourmet dish of technology...
cryogenic device catches all human life
under ice.

The current affair gets to be all our businness,
it's filtered in through the T.V. screen.
The norm, the average...what is this,
when it goes blank what does that all mean?
And what's the drive of each individual?
And what's the way that the story ends?
Is it Mr. X, left as the last residual
holder of the flame, conscience of all men?
But he's so tense to expire
he throws himself on the wire
under fire.

Is this the way the world ends?
Under ice, under fire?
Has there been some mistaken design?
Under ice
got to find the human voice.
Lord, deliver us from Babel.