By Stelios Misinas
CRETE, Greece (Reuters) – “Exercise, exercise, exercise,” read an emergency text message that warned people on the island of Crete about a false magnitude 7.2 earthquake in the city of Heraklion.
Tourists rushed to evacuate the hotel, while workers in body armor provided first aid to an injured woman in a tent as part of an earthquake drill dubbed “Minoas” after the mythical Bronze Age Cretan king.
“It’s good, because then we will know what we are doing in real situations,” said British tourist Leah Pickles, 36, one of the residents of the hotel in Heraklion.
Greece is frequently shaken by earthquakes as it sits on multiple faults.
Since a powerful earthquake killed 143 people near Athens in 1999, tremors have not caused deaths or serious damage, but the Mediterranean country has struggled with other emergencies, such as forest fires and floods, in recent years.
A wildfire on the island of Rhodes last summer consumed swaths of land and forced the evacuation of some 19,000 tourists and locals, weeks before Europe’s deadliest fire killed at least 20 people and destroyed an area larger than New York. in the northern province of Evros.
Separately, on Tuesday, a forest fire near the town of Chania in western Crete forced authorities to evacuate part of a naval base and adjacent schools, hours before a real 3.8 magnitude earthquake struck the southwest coast. of the island.
A fire department official later said the fire had subsided.
(Reporting by Stelios Misinas; writing by Angeliki Koutantou; editing by Alex Richardson)
