A tragedy was about to unfold in the wake of a fire that broke out from an unknown cause in a car, just outside Tripoli: The driver in his attempt to salvage what he could suffered burns. Other drivers who stopped to help pulled him away from the burning vehicle and alerted the ambulance, fire brigade, and police. Their attempts to use their cars’ fire extinguishers to put out the fire proved futile.

The first to arrive at the scene was a police car that didn’t even have a fire extinguisher (although it is mandatory for all vehicles, let alone a police car, according to the Code) and almost half an hour later the Fire Department showed up.

The injured driver, after intervention and persistence of citizens, was taken by the patrol car to be taken to a hospital, giving a “rendezvous” at the entrance of Tripoli with the ambulance that had not arrived at the scene. The injured man was travelling from Thessaloniki to Megalopoulo, where he comes from when at about 12.30 pm he saw smoke coming from the engine. He stopped and tried to save his car, but it “caught fire”. He suffered burns to his head, the left side of his body, and legs, and he cried out that everything he had was in the car. At 12.53 the fire brigade arrived, and then at 13.08 the highway patrol and an ambulance arrived, but the injured man had already left in the patrol car and had been taken to the Panarcadian Hospital in Tripoli.