Athens, Sept 7, (dpa/GNA) – Another person has died from Storm Daniel, which has produced record rainfall in Greece, public broadcaster ERT reported on Wednesday.
Firefighters recovered the body of an elderly woman in the village of Paltsi on Mount Pelion, located east of the central port city of Volos on the Greek mainland, ERT said.
This brings the number of known victims to two, with one person still missing. On Tuesday, a man died when a wall collapsed due to the flood waters.
Numerous villages affected by the storms could not be reached due to landslides and in some cases, also had no electricity, no mobile phone network and no internet.
The fatality comes as officials and media reported on Wednesday that Tuesday’s deluge, was the largest the country has experienced since the start of data collection.
The highest rainfall occurred in the town of Zagora, north-east of Volos, where a record 754 millimetres was dumped between midnight and 8:45 pm, according to the the Greek Meteorological Agency (EMY) and a report in the newspaper Kathimerini.
Hundreds of people spent the night on the ferry Superstar in the sea off the port city of Volos because port police, prevented the ship from docking since the port had been underwater and traffic in the city was difficult.
On Wednesday morning, the ship, which is owned by the shipping company Seajets, was still several nautical miles away from the port, as seen on the maritime tracking platform MarineTraffic.
The airport on the Aegean island of Skiathos also remained severely affected, where several hundred people also had to spend the night on Tuesday, airport spokesman Savvas Karagiannis said.
He said he could not say when the airport would fully resume operations.
“Unbelievable amounts of water have come down, the access roads are closed,” he said. People were being provided with food and water.
While the situation on the Sporades islands of Skiathos, Skopelos and Alonnisos eased slightly, Daniel continued to rage in the region of Thessaly.
The Civil Defence Department imposed driving bans for the municipalities there in the towns of Farsala and Karditsa so that emergency vehicles could travel freely, and because many roads were flooded, blocked and closed, as pictures in Greek media showed.
More is on the way, according to the country’s weather service. It warned on Wednesday of heavy rain, storms and a high number of lightning strikes.
According to the National Observatory of Athens, the previous record rainfall was held by Makrinitsa, near Valos, when 417 millimetres fell on December 10, 2009.
“What is happening in (the region of) Magnisia is an extremely extreme phenomenon, both in terms of the amount and intensity of the rainfall and its duration,” chief observatory meteorologist Kostas Lagouvardos told the newspaper Kathimerini.
Lagouvardos suspects that the current relatively high sea temperatures may have contributed.
“It is a static system that is constantly supplied with moist sea air, which means that it is constantly raining in the same place,” he said.
People were advised not to go out on the streets in these regions and to avoid trees and coastal areas due to the risk of lightning. Residents should not to try to cross torrents on foot or by car, authorities warned.
GNA