Greek port city in a state of emergency over flood of dead fish

ATHENS: The port city of Volos in central Greece declared a state emergency following an inundation of dead fish that local residents say could threaten their livelihoods, the state news agency announced Saturday.

The month-long emergency declaration issued by the climate ministry’s secretary general of civil protection, Vassilis Papageorgiou, will inject funding and resources to speed up the cleaning of the Pagasetic Gulf port where tons of dead fish have piled up along the coast and in rivers, according to Athens News Agency.

It is the second environmental catastrophe to hit the port of Volos, a three-and-a-half-hour drive north of Athens, after catastrophic floods hit the Thessaly region last year.

Those floods refilled a nearby lake that had been drained in 1962 a bid to fight malaria, swelling it to three times its normal size.

“After the storms Daniel and Elias last autumn, around 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of plains in Thessaly were flooded, and various freshwater fish were carried by rivers” to the sea, Dimitris Klaudatos, a professor of agriculture and environment at the University of Thessaly had said.

Since then the lake waters have receded drastically, forcing the freshwater fish toward the Volos port that empties into the Pagasetic Gulf and the Aegean Sea, where they cannot survive.

On Tuesday alone, authorities had removed 57 tons of the dead fish washed up on beaches near Volos.

Most of the thousands of dead fish that flooded the Pagasetic have been recovered, while two boats are completing the process Saturday, Ertnews channel reported.

Special nets have been placed at the mouth of the Xiria River to contain the large volume of dead fish.

Tourist traffic to the area has already plunged by nearly 80 percent since last year’s flooding, according to the local association of restaurants and bars.

“The situation with this dead fish will be the death of us,” said Stefanos Stefanou, the president of the association earlier this week. “What visitor will come to our city after this?”

The environmental crisis has prompted an investigation by public prosecutor.