A wooded area in northern Greece affected by wildfires for the past four days has been rocked by tragedy.
The Greek fire service found 18 bodies and initial reports suggest that the bodies belong to immigrants.
A coroner and an investigation team head to the location in the Dadia forest.
The Evros region in northeastern Greece, not far from the Turkish border, was devastated by fires.
A ferry for the sick
A hospital in the city of Alexandroupoli had to be evacuated and both intensive care patients and newborn babies were transferred overnight to a ferry docked in the port.
The fires have already caused another death, also believed to be a migrant, in a town near the coastal city.
The emergency services sent text messages via mobile phones to residents of the surrounding areas urging them to leave.
Dadia National Park is a large forested area north of Alexandroupoli, where fires have been burning since Monday.
The 18 bodies were found Tuesday near a cabin on the outskirts of the village of Avantas when firefighters inspected the charred remains of a building.
A fiery red glow was visible on the outskirts of Alexandroupoli in the early hours of Tuesday and satellite images showed various regions of Greece shrouded in thick smoke.
Overnight, residents of eight nearby towns were asked to they will leave their homes and headed to a safe place in the city.
A line of cars could be seen heading into the city on Tuesday as vegetation burned along the shoreline.
they saw each other flames entering the grounds of the university hospital while the operation to evacuate the place was underway.
The Greek authorities ordered that a fleet of ambulances and buses about 115 patients will be taken.
Also the industrial zone
While some of the patients were transferred to other hospitals in the city, until 90 were transported to a ferrythe Adamantios Korais, which was requisitioned to treat intensive care patients and newborns.
Fires are also burning tens of kilometers northwest of the city, in Rhodope, and further west, along the coast, in Kavala.
West of the capital several warehouses were engulfed in flames in an industrial area of Aspropyrgos, and near the Attica highway the sky darkened with thick smoke.
Two Albanian workers told the BBC that if the helicopters had arrived in time they would have been able to put out the fire.
On Tuesday around noon there was a second big fire on the opposite side of the road, in the village of Fyli.
Half an hour later, the residents received a message on their mobile from the emergency number 112 to evacuate the area.
The fire also spread near the historic monastery of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary of Kleistona few kilometers north of Fyli, in the foothills of Mount Parnitha.
50 nuns
Fire service officials say 50 nuns live in the monastery and that a disaster response team has been dispatched to get them to safety.
Greece is one of several European countries currently running a extreme risk of forest firesaccording to the EU climate monitoring service, Copernicus.
Meanwhile, France suffered the hottest day in its history on Monday after the mid-August holiday, according to the Météo-France meteorological service.
Temperatures on Monday reached 42.4 °C in the Drôme areain the south-east of France, but the record refers to Monday’s average daily temperature of 26.63 °C, recorded at 30 weather stations across France.
In Switzerland, high temperatures have led the “zero degree isotherm”the height where temperatures drop below freezing, at a record high altitude.
MeteoSwiss said the limit had now been increased to 5,298 m (17,381 ft).
The point is getting higher and higher, mainly due toman-induced global warmingsays the Swiss meteorological office.
The rise in the height of the zero degree isotherm has been accelerating since the 1970s, especially in spring and summer, he says.
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See original article on BBC