ENGINE revving, Greek apple farmer Thymios Economou strained to drive a pickup truck through a dirt road and reach his flood-stricken orchard.

After a while, the vehicle became stuck. Economou points to the hillside above, 500m high, eaten into by Storm Daniel that struck central Greece this month.

“There used to be an apple orchard there. All the trees were carried away by the flood,” the 53-year-old told AFP.

“Some people will not be able to reach their fields at all. They will get zero income this year,” Economou said.

The deluge caused by Storm Daniel three weeks ago, unleashing months’ worth of rain in just hours, destroyed roads and bridges, drowned tens of thousands of farm animals and left 17 people dead.

“I lost 100 trees at one of my farms,” Antonis Laskos, 62, said.

“They were uprooted and ended up in the sea.”

Zagora was Greece’s apple powerhouse, with a farm cooperative that dated to 1916. Some 800 families built their lives on the fruit.

The area’s Zagorin apples – a Starking Delicious variety introduced from California in the early 1950s – have since 1996 carried a protected European designation of origin label.

The villagers of Zagora, the area that produced some of Greece’s finest apples, said up to 80% of the local road network was knocked out and would not be easy to replace.

And even the surviving crop was hard to bring in, as the only bridge left standing in the area cannot sustain the 45-tonne trucks normally used for transport, cooperative head Yiannis Kravvaris said.

“Smaller trucks will have to be used, and this will push up costs significantly,” he noted.

‘Impossible to fix everything’

“There are rebuilding efforts but the damage is so extensive that it’s impossible to fix everything,” Ioulia Papoulia said, an agronomist in charge of quality control at the Zagorin farm cooperative.

“Last year we had 18.5 million apples. This year we’ll be lucky to get five million kilos,” she said.

The Athens Observatory put Zagora at the epicentre of the storm.

From September 4-8, the observatory recorded 1,096mm of rain – including over 750mm on September 5.

The average rainfall in the area is 150mm. The previous maximum in Zagora was 231mm in 2018.

This week, another storm named Elias dumped an additional 96mm of water.

Harvester Costas Zervas, 50, said this year’s apple crop was already problematic owing to climate change.

“We had frequent rain in June that caused disease.

“And the winter was mild. Apple trees need the cold, from 800 to 1,600 hours of frost annually,” Zervas explained.

Facing a barrage of criticism at a perceived failure in cooperation between the army and civil protection in the hours following the disaster, the government has pledged over €2 billion (RM99.1 billion) in reconstruction funds.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who comfortably won reelection and a second four-year term in June, warned Greece was facing a “climate war”.

“Over a two-week period, we experienced the worst wildfire and the worst floods in our history,” Mitsotakis said this month.

Fires across Greece killed at least 26 people this summer, most of them migrants trapped in a forest near the northeastern border with Turkey.

A massive blaze in the Dadia National Park in northeastern Greece that burned for over two weeks was later described by the European Commission as the largest on record in Europe. – AFP, October 4, 2023.