A firefighter operates near Penteli, northeast of Athens, Greece, Monday, Aug. 12, 2024.
A wildfire that started outside Athens and made its way to the city, burning some 10,000 hectares of forest and scrubland along the way, started from a wooden power grid pylon, an experts’ report released earlier in December says.
It turns out that wooden pylons are involved in several cases of fires: wires snap, for some reason, often high winds, fall to the ground and the sparks are enough to start a blaze.
Experts and citizens, the latter among those who suffered the effects of wildfires, have long been calling for portions of the grid to be diverted underground. To no avail, most of the time.
When the Supreme Court finally rules about the cause of the wildfire, it opens the way for residents to be awarded damages from DEDDIE, the Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator. The trouble is, it often takes many years for the cases to wind their way through the courts, often to the point of the case being dismissed under the statute of limitations.
Besides this year’s Attica fire, at least three other wildfires have been found to have started from a damaged pylon. Two of them, in Peloponnese and Crete, happened in 2013 and the third in July 2015, also in Peloponnese, in the regional unit of Laconia. All three cases took seven to nine years to be resolved in court.
In the case of the 2013 Peloponnese fire, two individuals, a man and his aunt, were nearly killed by a surge of electrical current that had permeated the ground. The woman’s nephew was knocked unconscious when he touched her.