July 24th - What lessons can be learned from the response to Greece's wildfires?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 24 July 2023
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At the peak of the summer season, wildfires have raged in Rhodes – triggering the chaotic evacuation of thousands of holidaymakers amid distressing circumstances. What lessons will be learnt and what (limited) options are available for people who have yet to travel?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. |
| 0:06.1 | It's Monday the 24th of July and what a terrible weekend it has been for many of the people |
| 0:12.2 | of the island of roads and indeed for thousands of holiday makers who were one minute |
| 0:19.1 | enjoying a lovely relaxed break and the next |
| 0:22.6 | unfortunately running for their lives grabbing whatever possessions they could |
| 0:28.6 | awful scenes that we have witnessed over the last couple of days and I want in this |
| 0:36.1 | podcast to address what we need to learn from this because |
| 0:40.8 | there's an awful lot of anger out there I can imagine how distressing how exhausting the ordeal |
| 0:51.0 | of the holidaymakers was and among the questions they're asking is, why was there |
| 0:56.1 | a sudden evacuation? Why was there not a more orderly evacuation, given that the wildfires were |
| 1:04.9 | known about? I don't know if we will see that there will be more precautionary evacuations in future. |
| 1:12.4 | That's something to be considered and the Greek emergency services, I'm sure, |
| 1:16.5 | we'll be looking at that, along with the holiday companies. |
| 1:20.2 | Now, I'm kind of going to split them into two groups. |
| 1:24.7 | So the first one is Jet 2 and twoy big tour operators the two biggest by |
| 1:30.1 | far in the UK and what they have been doing now we've heard and you might well have |
| 1:34.4 | heard in the media lots of reports of lots of people saying that they felt there was |
| 1:40.0 | no communication that buses just turned up they weren't told what was happening they |
| 1:44.0 | weren't sure it was going to happen to their stuff they weren't sure where they were going to |
| 1:47.2 | sleep they ended up on the floor of a school with very little sanitation um with with no water |
| 1:53.4 | some of them walked for miles it's just awful things to uh have to um do when you are in in feeling feeling scared for your life and of course if you've |
| 2:04.4 | got family there that's going to make it even worse so while that was happening and |
... |
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