Homes and roads damaged by flooding in Greece just weeks after deadly storms battered the country

Home and roads have been damaged by fresh floods in Greece just weeks after the country was battered by deadly storms.

Torrential rain swept across swathes of central Greece on Wednesday – with power cuts in the coastal city of Volos and the island of Evia.

At least eight villages were evacuated late on Wednesday as floodwaters rose.

Meanwhile road traffic was banned in Volos, a city of around 140,000, with residents urged to stay indoors.

The fire service received hundreds of calls for assistance in the city and dozens of people were evacuated from flooded homes, but there were no reports of deaths or people missing.

State-run ERT television said the basement of the Volos hospital was inundated, although services were not affected.

Footage shows floodwaters gushing through the streets of Evia after the torrential downpour.

The fresh heavy storms follow deadly wildfires which caused record destruction in the summer, and earlier on Wednesday the government said adapting to climate change has become a national priority.

Volos, the nearby Mount Pilion area and other parts of central Greece are still recovering from the floods earlier this month which caused 16 deaths, destroyed homes and infrastructure, wrecked crops and drowned tens of thousands of livestock in the key farming area of Thessaly.

Some of these areas still lack drinking water as a result of the previous storms.

In the northern part of Evia island, army and municipal crews cleared debris from the roads near the flood-hit towns of Limni and Mantoudi, where the fire service reported receiving dozens of calls on Wednesday from flooded households for assistance.

Authorities had been placed on alert in central Greece and nearby islands following the storm forecast.

The government said the initial estimate of the damage from the storm earlier this month exceeded €2bn (£1.73bn), with infrastructure repair alone expected to cost nearly €700m (£606m).

Greece has been promised emergency funding from the European Union and is renegotiating details of existing aid packages to target more funds to cope with the damage caused by wildfires and floods.

“I will restate the obvious: The frequency of (weather) assaults due to the climate crisis is something that requires us to integrate civil protection (in our response),” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday.

“Adaptation to the climate crisis is a fundamental priority in all our policies.”

This article was originally published by Sky.com. Read the original article here.