Dateline: Oct 30

This week Dateline reporter Evan Williams follows President of Greek Community in Victoria Bill Papastergiadis as he goes back to his ‘Motherland’ to examine the scale of devastation of a fire in Mati, and help the victims begin the process of rebuilding their lives.

A tragic fire in Greece’s seaside town Mati took 99 lives in July this year. It was the world’s second largest fire death toll after Australia’s Black Saturday fires in 2009, which became a catalyst for major change in Australian bushfire management and early warning systems.

Many questions remain: could those who lost their lives in Mati have been saved? Did the austerity measures inflicted on Greece play a part in the devastation? What role did climate change play in the fire’s force and intensity?

While in Mati, Evan also speaks to the survivors, fire-fighters, experts and civil servants to piece together what went wrong.

Dimitri Kardiakos, whose family lived in the region for generations, lost his family home and some of his lifelong friends. “You don’t see fire at the beginning but you feel a kind of heat as if you are opening the oven you cook in”, he tells Dateline. “The heat burns you. There was panic. Everything was exploding. It was like a state of war. There were tears, screaming but we were all saying we wanted to live”.

The biggest loss of life and property that Greece has ever experienced resulted in three days of national mourning. And that mourning extended to Australia’s Greek community (the largest Greek diaspora worldwide), who witnessed a similar tragedy almost a decade ago on Australia’s Black Saturday.

In Melbourne, Bill Papastergiadis raised AUD $200,000 with Melbourne’s Greek Community, and then travelled to Mati to distribute the funds to the victims. “For Greek Australians, there is almost an umbilical connection to the mother land,” he recalls to Dateline. “Pain felt in Greece, we felt that immediately in Australia. I’m here to do my bit as small as it is to provide some help and assistance”.

Mati locals tell Dateline that public outrage was fuelled by lack of proper action by the government officials. Vangelis Bournos, Mayor of Rafina-Pikermi, says his pleas for help were ignored. “We saw the fire at 4:40pm. They [authorities] had until 5:10 to give this evacuation order so that we could have evacuated the area within an hour. If a preventive evacuation plan had been given at the start of the fire, everyone would have been saved”.

Demetrious Karavellas, President of The World Wildlife Federation in Greece, had been warning the government to invest in prevention and preparedness to avoid tragedies like this owing to climate change in Greece.

“The reality of climate change in a country like Greece is a harsh reality and it’s a reality that we need to adapt to. Forests in Greece and Mediterranean because of climate change are becoming a lot more vulnerable and also a lot more valuable. Higher temperature, stronger winds and a problematic management system, it’s not going to work. I hope that something will change after 2018”.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, criticism has mounted over how authorities responded to the blaze – in particular, the absence of a warning system or evacuation plan. In response, the Deputy Minister for Citizen Protection resigned and the Heads of both Police and Fire Brigade were dismissed.

Bill Papastergiadis, however, hopes that the Australian contribution can help the victims to start rebuilding their lives in their own way. “Why did we do this? We did it because wherever Greek people live they hurt for their fellow Greek”.

Tuesday, October 31 at 9.30pm on SBS.