“The foresters with the EMAK left by air in the middle of the night at great risk to reach Rhodes, plus the forces we had in the area, the local government, the army, the police. Everyone coordinated and organised themselves well. There was prevention and 112 and Lemnos and Chalkidiki and everywhere,” said the Minister of Climate Crisis and Civil Protection, Vassilis Kikilias to ANT1.

As he noted, the climate crisis and the major natural disasters affecting the entire planet prove that human life always comes first, and that is why citizens now have to be particularly careful and discipline the authorities and 112, even if sometimes the messages do not correspond exactly to the weather phenomena that eventually come. “We have to listen and pay special attention. And if we sometimes overreact to 112, the recommendations of the Risk Assessment Committee – which is the Observatory, the National Weather Service and our top scientists – are these. I prefer 112 to go out, so that all citizens are suspicious and know what is happening, rather than one time not to go out and mourn even one human life,” the minister said.

“The Civil Protection is doing its job, it did it very seriously. Just as we did it in the summer with the fires, we are doing it now with the floods. With a lot of effort and a lot of effort, these guys, the people of the EMAK, the foresters of the EMODEs, the volunteers, the special rescuers, 4,000 thousand calls in three days, very, very large mobilization in the field. I have to say a big thumbs up to all these people. And the Greek society should feel that, yes, the state is next to the citizens and helps,” the minister said, noting that there is a plan for the most difficult scenarios, and for Attica, which, he said, is overpopulated and there are blocked streams, such as in the northern part of Kifissos, where 50 houses and two factories are built in the stream.

Reiterating his view that in some areas compensation should be given to owners, some properties should be demolished and streams should be unpatched, Kikilias said that the money for these compensations “is underpaid. That is, I believe that now – the president of the European Investment Bank, who visited me in the Civil Protection war room, said so – for every 1 euro we invest in prevention and infrastructure projects, we save 8 euros from disasters.”

Finally, on infrastructure, he said: “The government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis – I want to be honest – in these five years has made not steps, but significant leaps in the field of civil protection, but also public works. There was generally a situation that was not in order, we did not even know what the main projects were, where they were, whether they had progressed. Now there is a prioritisation based on the funds that exist because there is no money to do everything horizontally in the unit of time. Legislation is permanently enacted to reduce time, reduce bureaucracy, and make the state more efficient. We have seen this in the case of the Ministry of Civil Protection. Kir. Mitsotakis gave 2.1 billion euros for the AEGIS program. And all of a sudden we have drones and we have seen them working and we have seen a war room in the Civil Protection, 112, which had been discredited, the top tool that exists. They engage to see the forces operating in the field. Artificial intelligence is coming, new Canadair, new helicopters, 1,200 fire trucks.”