Two crew members are dead after a midair collision while fighting a wildfire west of Athens that was ignited not by climate change but by sparks from a faulty power line feeding a private wind generator into Greece's electrical grid. The same green-energy infrastructure Western governments subsidize at breakneck speed just killed two people and gutted thousands of hectares of pine forest, farmland, and homes — and Americans should take note, because the eco-policy machine isn't just costly, it's combustible.
The blaze started Friday when sparks from the transmission line connecting a wind facility to the main network ignited pine forests and scrubland west of Athens, Greece's firefighting department said Sunday. Gale-force winds drove the fire through the weekend, forcing more than 1,000 evacuations and beach rescues of over 250 people. By Monday, nearly 500 firefighters and ten aircraft were still on the front, and authorities had arrested an electrical engineer and a contractor on felony arson charges. An arrest warrant was issued for the wind generator company's owner.
NBC News reported the wind-farm origin deep in its story. The Guardian didn't mention the cause at all, instead framing the disaster around extreme weather and heat. Neither outlet discussed forest management — controlled burns, thinning, fuel-load reduction — the very policies that green lobbying groups have fought worldwide and that have turned forests from Washington state to the Mediterranean into tinderboxes.
The casualties are real. A Greek and a Danish crew member died Sunday when their helicopter collided with another near the seaside area of Psatha. The second helicopter's crew — a Greek and a British national — survived with light injuries. In France, a separate megafire has forced 224,000 people from their homes in what may be the country's largest peacetime evacuation, burning a scar four times the size of Paris. Roughly 3,000 French firefighters remain deployed.
NBC noted that Greece suffers devastating wildfires every summer and that
