Firefighters in Greece say the forest fires north of the capital Athens are now under control. They say this is due to the subsidence of the recent strong winds and to the wide-scale deployment of firefighting aircraft.

In the past few days, the area north of Athens has been threatened by a sea of flames that has damaged or destroyed 150 homes and reduced more than 20,000 hectares of forest and olive groves to ash. Thousands of people have fled the region. No casualties have been reported.

The Greek media have attacked the government for failing to learn lessons from previous forest fires. One left-wing paper has reported that in recent years the government has spent 97 billion euros on armaments but only 300 million euros on fire-fighting equipment.

Photo of firefighting plane by greekadman (flickr)