Two people were seriously injured while two others were rescued after their helicopter crashed in the Aegean Sea in Greece on Wednesday while taking part in a forest fire-fighting operation on the island of Samos, according to the Greek Coast Guard.
“All the crew members were spotted, two of them safe and the other two unconscious,” said a statement from the fire department on Wednesday evening. The Romanian pilot of the water bomber helicopter was the first the Coast Guard found unharmed shortly after the crash late Wednesday afternoon. Then the authorities spotted two other unconscious crew members in the water, a Romanian and a Moldovan, whose condition is described as “critical”, according to the authorities.
“They have been hospitalized and resuscitation efforts are underway,” an official from the Coast Guard press office told AFP. The fourth member of the crew, a Greek, initially missing, was finally discovered safe and sound near a beach on the island of Samos in the Aegean Sea on Wednesday evening, the coast guard said.
Fighting a forest fire
The helicopter “was helping to fight a forest fire in Samos,” said a fire department official. According to the first information reported by public television Ert, the accident occurred while he was refueling with seawater to fight a forest fire in Samos “, which had started on the island around 2 p.m.
Three helicopters and five water bombers in total, supported by around fifty firefighters, began to fight the flames on Wednesday afternoon. But once night fell only the firefighters were able to stay on the spot to try to contain the fire, the planes and helicopters being able to operate only during the day.
Strong winds of more than 7 on the Beaufort scale (which has thirteen degrees) were blowing in the region while the temperature reached nearly 30 degrees Celsius on Wednesday. Greece is almost every summer the prey of often violent forest fires.
European aid
To strengthen its means after the devastating fires of last summer which killed three people and ravaged 130,000 hectares, the Greek government asked, within the framework of the European Civil Protection Mechanism (MEPC), its European partners to preventively deploy this been firefighters from several Member States. Thus, since July 1, 250 Romanian, French, German, Bulgarian, Finnish and Norwegian firefighters have successively begun to be deployed across the country.
Dozens of small and medium forest fires have broken out in recent weeks in Greece, fanned by strong winds and temperatures of more than 30 degrees Celsius, without causing any victims so far.