Greek port city in state of emergency due to flood of dead fish

The port city of Volos in central Greece has declared a state of emergency after a flood of dead fish that residents say could threaten their livelihoods, the state news agency said on Saturday.

The one-month emergency declaration, issued by the Climate Ministry's Secretary General for Civil Protection, Vassilis Papageorgiou, provides for the provision of funds and resources to speed up the cleaning of the port in the Pagasetic Gulf, where tons of dead fish have accumulated along the coast and in the rivers, the Athens news agency said.

This is already the second environmental disaster in the port of Volos, three and a half hours' drive north of Athens, after the region of Thessaly was hit by catastrophic floods last year.

The floods refilled a nearby lake that had been drained in 1962 as part of malaria control efforts, causing it to swell to three times its normal size.

“After 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 the rivers into the sea,” said Dimitris Klaudatos, professor of agriculture and environment at the University of Thessaly.

Since then, the water level of the lake has drastically decreased and the freshwater fish are forced to migrate towards the port of Volos, which flows into the Pagasetic Gulf and the Aegean Sea, where they cannot survive.

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

Most of the thousands of dead fish that washed into the Pagasit have been recovered, with two boats set to complete the recovery operation on Saturday, Ertnews reported.

In order to catch the large number of dead fish, special nets were laid out at the mouth of the Xiria River.

According to the local restaurant and bar association, tourist traffic in the region has already fallen by almost 80 percent since the floods last year.

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

The environmental crisis has triggered prosecutorial investigations.

kan/giv