Chouliaras: “Two huge lakes were created in central Greece”

About the nightmare that Thessaly is living and what needs to be done the next day, Gerasimos Chouliaras, the Research Director of the Geodynamic Institute of the Athens Observatory, spoke on the ERT show “News Room” and to Christos Pagonis and Eva Perona, stressing that the possibility of induced seismicity is an object that experts monitor.

“Two huge lakes have been created in central Greece. Lakes 74 square kilometers is the water imaged by satellite, so the geomorphology of the area has changed. As a seismologist I can tell you that the static adequacy of buildings submerged in water is the concern. It is something that the state must deal with immediately, because most of these houses have been destroyed. They cannot be repopulated due to static sufficiency“, he emphasized.

“Infrastructure is the first thing the state is looking at right now. Normalcy must begin and that starts with infrastructure. The issue is the Infrastructure Register, which I heard from the Technical Chamber that it has not yet been drawn up. This will complicate the situation a bit, but I hope that there will be cooperation from the authorities and that these works will be completed as soon as possible” he added and noted:

“The area is seismic, we all know that. We know of big earthquakes in Sofades, Volos, etc. We don’t need to say words about the danger of the area and for this very reason I raised the issue of the buildings, that great attention is needed for their static adequacy. Whether there is a possibility of induced seismicity, i.e. of creating an earthquake from the volume of water that has fallen, this is an object that we are also monitoring with the seismographs we have in the area. We have not observed any such problem so far, but the problem of lakes and the resulting seismicity has always existed and will always exist. Within the framework of the observations we make, these observations are also».

Source: ERT