ATHENS: Nearly 100,000 hectares of forestry and farmland have burned in less than two weeks in Greece in the worst wave of wildfires since 2007, the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) said Wednesday.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mistotakis described the 586 fires that ravaged several regions of Greece in just a few days as “a natural disaster of exceptional magnitude”.

More than 93,600 hectares (231,000 acres) went up in smoke in just 14 days, fuelled by an extraordinary heatwave that struck at the beginning of August, according to AFP calculations based on EFFIS data from July 29 to August 11.

The average burn over the same period between 2008-2020 was 2,330 hectares.

“They are still very destructive today everywhere, and have a rare high level of intensity,” according to Mark Parrington of Copernicus, the European Climate Change service, which includes EFFIS.

The symbolic threshold of 100,000 hectares burned in Greece is expected to be reached on Thursday or Friday, as fires continued to rage Wednesday in the Peloponnese in the west and the island of Evia in the east.

Evia, Greece’s second biggest island, has borne the brunt of the fires, home to more than half the total area burned.

Its thick pine forests, still ablaze on Wednesday, have been largely reduced to ash in the northern part of the island.

While fires were to be expected given the very dry conditions, nothing suggested their dreadful scale, said Charalampos Kontoes, director of the National Observatory in Athens.

“To some extent, fires were expected because of the very dry season,” Kontoes told AFP. “But I can tell you that in Greece we never had such big fires. We have fires during hot seasons but not at that size.”

In all, a total of around 110,000 hectares have gone up in flames this year as of August 11, with over 90 percent of the damage coming in the last two weeks alone. That’s compared to an average of just over 9,000 hectares over the previous 12 years, according to the latest EFFIS figures.