Introduction

On the 24 August 2007, 67 people were killed and 5,392 people were affected by a forest fire in the province of Ilias, a predominantly rural and semi-rural area in the Peloponnesus region of Greece. The fire was considered the worst ‘natural disaster’ in Greece during the period 2001–10. The economic damage was calculated to be in the region of US$1,750,000,000 (International Disaster Database, 2010); the environmental degradation was enormous.

The governing party (New Democracy) argued that weather conditions had played an integral role in the spread of the fire. It tried to abdicate responsibility for its slow and insufficient response by suggesting that the fires were a ‘natural disaster’ and tried to strip away the political context of the disaster by relocating the blame from the structural to the ‘natural’ (see Wisner et al, 2004). The claim made by Mr Polidoras, the Minister of Public Order and the man in charge of the fire fighting efforts, that ‘General Wind is the one that is prohibiting the fire fighting efforts’ was indicative of that attempt. Such statements were replicated over and over again in various media accounts (for example, Newsroom DOL, 2007).

Numerous accounts, though, have suggested that other forces were at play. For example, development projects created an incentive for the removal of forested areas and created opportunities for exploitation by corrupt public officials (Karamichas, 2007; NTUA, 2008; Zirogiannis, 2009). The suspicion is that the slow response of the state machine was not accidental (Pendaraki, 2010). As a member of the citizen's action group put it: