The port city of Volos in central Greece has declared a state emergency due to an influx of dead fish that local residents fear may jeopardize their livelihoods, as reported by the state news agency on Saturday.
The climate ministry’s secretary general of civil protection, Vassilis Papageorgiou, has issued a month-long emergency declaration, allocating funding and resources to accelerate the cleanup of the Pagasetic Gulf port, where tons of dead fish have accumulated along the coast and in rivers, according to Athens News Agency.
This is the second environmental disaster to affect the port of Volos, located about a three-and-a-half-hour drive north of Athens, following devastating floods in the Thessaly region last year.
Those floods caused a nearby lake, which had been drained in 1962 to combat malaria, to swell to three times its normal size.
“After the autumn storms Daniel and Elias last year, around 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of plains in Thessaly were flooded, and various freshwater fish were carried by rivers to the sea,” said Dimitris Klaudatos, a professor at the University of Thessaly specializing in agriculture and the environment.
With the receding waters of the lake, freshwater fish have been forced towards the Volos port, which leads to the Pagasetic Gulf and the Aegean Sea, where they cannot survive.
Authorities removed 57 tons of dead fish washed up on Volos beaches in a single day earlier this week.
Most of the dead fish that inundated the Pagasetic have already been collected, with two boats completing the cleanup process, as reported by Ertnews channel.
To contain the large volume of dead fish, special nets have been placed at the mouth of the Xiria River.
Tourist visits to the area have plummeted by almost 80 percent since last year’s flooding, according to the local association of restaurants and bars.
“The situation with this dead fish will be the death of us,” said Stefanos Stefanou, the association’s president. “Who will want to visit our city after this?”
The environmental crisis has prompted a public prosecutor to launch an investigation.
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