In the port city of Volos, in central Greece, a state of emergency has been declared in order to remediate the consequences of sea pollution caused by tons of dead fish.
The General Secretary for Civil Protection of the Ministry of Climate Crisis, Vasilis Papageorgiou, indicated that "a state of emergency for civil protection has been declared in the municipality of Volos (...) in the region of Thessaly, in order to respond to urgent needs and manage the consequences of the sea pollution that occurred in Pagasetic Bay," the state news agency ANA/MPA reported.
It is the second environmental disaster to hit Volos, 330 kilometers north of Athens. The first was floods last year in the Thessaly region that filled a nearby lake that had been drained in 1962 to fight malaria, increasing it to three times its normal size.
"After the storms Danijel and Elias last fall, about 20.000 hectares of plains in Thessaly were flooded, and freshwater fish were transported by rivers to the sea," explained Dimitris Klaudatos, professor of agriculture and environment at the University of Thessaly.
Since then, the water in the lake has dropped significantly, driving the freshwater fish to the port of Volos, then to the Pagasetic Gulf and the Aegean Sea, where they cannot survive.
On Tuesday alone, the authorities removed 57 tons of dead fish from the beaches near Volos.
According to the local restaurant association, the number of tourists has dropped by almost 80 percent since last year's floods.
"The situation with this dead fish will kill us," said Stefanos Stefanu, president of the association. "Who will come to our city after this?" he asks.
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