The president of the OASP Professor Efthymios Lekkas talks about the problems caused by floods and weather phenomena as well as the anti-seismic shielding of the country in an interview with APE-MPE.

Regarding the risk of flooding in the Basin, Mr. Lekkas underlines that Kifissos is drastically limited by the construction that has been done on both sides, noting that one could say that it is a river that is suffocating.

“Kifissos is the main river of the hydrographic network that drains 2/3 of the area of ​​the basin of Attica. Of course, Kifissos is drastically limited by the construction that has been done on both sides and one could say that it is a suffocating river. The flood risk along it and on both sides is great. An element that contributes to this is that the basin has been cemented resulting in almost zero natural absorption and therefore the high runoff of water and its channeling into the Kifisos bed,” he emphasizes.

According to the professor, man is solely responsible for the climate crisis, who “interferes and disrupts processes”.

“Natural phenomena have been evolving on Earth for millions of years. What we should do is to moderate our intervention and adapt to the phenomena of nature” says the professor.

For the anti-seismic shielding of the country, Mr. Lekkas underlines that “Greece is very well protected even in large-scale earthquakes” and “Greeks have acquired a high-level knowledge and understanding of dealing with an earthquake disaster, which is even improving from generation to generation, which unfortunately has not done for floods and fires”.

He also points out that the Pre-Earthquake Inspection of Buildings Program was recently updated, making pre-earthquake inspection of critical infrastructure mandatory, an action implemented within the framework of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.

The three major events that shocked him

AP: From the first moment that I dealt with the subject of natural disaster management, I considered it appropriate to be present in the field of the evolution of the phenomena. During these years I have carried out over 60 missions around the world and dozens across Greece. I have never been a couch potato scientist. I always wanted to be close to the evolution of the phenomena and especially close to the people who suffer the effects of a disaster” said Mr. Lekkas.

Of all the missions he went on, 3 events were etched in his memory:

a) The earthquake (9.3 Mw) and tsunami in December 2004 in the Indian Ocean, where more than 227,000 people in 14 countries lost their lives,

b) The 2011 earthquake (9.1 Mw) and tsunami in Japan, which in turn caused the physical-technological disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant and

c) The last major earthquake event in Turkey in 2023, an event with many effects including, many human losses, a terrifying number of building and infrastructure collapses, an extremely large number and variety of accompanying geodynamic phenomena, which in turn created additional effects.

In fact, in the mission to Turkey I was in charge of the entire Greek mission, which had a positive result, not only in the field of aid and crisis management, but mainly in the relations between Greece and Turkey that were formed in continuously.