‘People feel unprotected’: Greeks lose faith in state after Storm Daniel and a summer of wildfires

Before the catastrophe in Libya, the cyclone brought devastation to Thessaly – and there are fears the climate crisis will bring more

The whiff of death permeates the once fertile plain of Thessaly. Thirteen days may have elapsed since Storm Daniel pummelled Greece – a prelude to the fatal descent it would make on Libya – but even now, as the flood waters slowly recede, families bury loved ones and the authorities begin to catalogue the scale of the destruction, it is clear the agricultural heart of the country has been devastated beyond recognition.

What remains is a broken land, rain-sodden and bruised, covered with the detritus of all that fell foul of the storm, animate and inanimate, fish, birds, bees, dogs, cats, livestock, buildings, bridges and roads.

This weekend, Greek soldiers in masks and protective suits were frantically collecting carcasses for mass incineration. More than 200,000 animals perished in the storms, officials say, and with fears of outbreaks of infectious disease, there is a race against time to remove putrefying remains from farms and pens in areas frequently described as impassable.

“The stench is unbearable,” one reporter told viewers on state-run television. “And it hangs over Thessaly.”

At least 17 people lost their lives in floods whose waters continue to submerge fields of cotton and corn, villages and towns in a thick layer of mud and sludge.

After Daniel’s devastating impact on Libya – where the death toll has surpassed 11,000 – Greeks are counting their blessings. But anger is also mounting. In a region hit by a ferocious Mediterranean cyclone, or “medicane”, named Ianos, exactly three years ago on Monday, fury is widespread that almost no flood prevention measures had been taken even if most accept that this month’s storms, energised by a summer of unprecedented heat, had not occurred in several hundred years. The downpours unleashed by Daniel were the worst since records began in the 1930s.

“You could call it the perfect storm,” Greece’s leading climatologist, Prof Christos Zerefos, told the Observer. “Locked between two meteorological systems it stood still, unable to move from west to east, taking its energy from the ever-warmer sea and [dumping] the equivalent of a year’s rain on Thessaly in two days.”

At 80 years old, Zerefos has long been studying changing weather patterns at the Academy of Athens’ research centre for atmospheric physics and climatology. He is the first to say that Daniel was “a very rare” extreme weather event, a storm whose magnitude he did not think he would ever see.

But what worries Zerefos is with the atmosphere so destabilised by a changing climate Ianos may not be a one-off. “The Ianos medicane cost about one fifth of the damage [predicted from] Daniel,” he said. “What frightens me is that we’ll have more events like Ianos, say every four or five years, which would not only be highly destructive but very costly.”

With so many in Greece’s agricultural heartland facing financial ruin – livestock recovery alone is expected to take years – the centre-right government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been put on the defensive.

After a summer of devastating wildfires – including a blaze described as Europe’s biggest after ravaging an area the size of New York City in the north-eastern region of Evros – there are growing public concerns that state authorities are ill-equipped to deal with natural disasters in a part of the world already singled out as a climate emergency hotspot. The sight of hapless residents in Thessaly being rescued by volunteers before civil protection units could get to them has reinforced the image of official incompetence.

On Thursday the polling company Metron Analysis, releasing its first survey of public opinion after the floods, noted that 61% of respondents had a negative opinion of the government’s work, versus 57% in May. For the first time since Mitsotakis, who won a second four-year term in June, assumed power, analysts have begun to speak of the nation resembling a “failed state”.

“There is a prevalent feeling that Greece is a failed state, that it cannot meet our expectations or [global] challenges,” said Maria Karaklioumi, a political analyst at the polling company Rass. “When Mitsotakis first came to power [in 2019] he promised that the country and state would work better and that hasn’t happened.”

Likening Greek sentiment to the backlash against US president George W Bush, whose reputation was badly hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she added: “People right now feel unprotected and abandoned. After the floods and fires, any sense of security that the state should offer has evaporated.”

Late on Saturday, in his first annual keynote economic speech since re-election, Mitsotakis emphasised that he would not only highlight challenges posed by the climate emergency – announcing local and EU-funded relief measures for those hit by the floods – but forge ahead with structural changes to a system that has clearly laboured under the pressure of dealing with successive disasters.

With the wildfires and floods expected to weigh on an economy otherwise doing well in the aftermath of Greece’s near decade-long debt crisis, the climate, more than any other potential foe has, after Daniel’s passing, clearly become the leader’s public enemy number one.

Photograph: Dimtiris Papamitsos/AP - Floodwaters cover a plain in Thessaly on 8 September; at least 17 people died and the clean-up operation is continuing.