Storms in Greece Flood Olive Groves, Damage Trees

In Greece, unusu­ally wet weather caused by the Mediterranean Storm Daniel has damp­ened the expec­ta­tions of olive and olive oil pro­duc­ers in the affected areas ahead of the upcom­ing olive har­vest.

For three days, a wave of cat­a­clysmic rain and squalls swept the coun­try from the north­west to the south­east, even­tu­ally los­ing its edge in the Aegean Sea.

Large swathes of the Thessaly Plain in cen­tral Greece, the most exten­sive cul­ti­vated flat­land in the coun­try chiefly reserved for grow­ing wheat and cot­ton, went under­wa­ter.

Several vil­lages in the area were sub­merged, and Volos, a port city of 150,000 peo­ple, was flooded.

The death toll from the storm has risen to 16, with fears that the num­ber will increase fur­ther as the waters recede in the com­ing days.

On its way, Daniel ham­mered sev­eral olive oil-pro­duc­ing regions of the coun­try, flood­ing olive groves and dam­ag­ing olive trees and dru­pes.

In west­ern Peloponnese, a hail­storm swept through the olive groves near the con­tem­po­rary town of Ancient Olympia, knock­ing olive fruits to the ground.

“The rain and the hail­storm lasted for about an hour,” said Alexis Katsanis, the head of the local com­mu­nity of Louvro. ​“Seventy per­cent [of the olives] fell to the ground, and the 30 per­cent that remained on the trees have been dam­aged by the hail­stones and will even­tu­ally rot.”

“It is a huge cat­a­stro­phe,” he added. ​“Prices of olive oil are high, and we were expect­ing a robust olive har­vest in our area this sea­son. But the storm has left the local pro­duc­ers in despair.”

Local award-win­ning pro­ducer Alexis Karabelas of AMG Karabelas said the storm mainly affected the olive trees in the higher areas of the region, also poten­tially threat­en­ing the har­vest of the fol­low­ing crop year.

“These areas face almost com­plete destruc­tion,” Karabelas told Olive Oil Times. ​“Olive grow­ers must apply cop­per-based fungi­cides and remove most of the wounded tree branches. Otherwise, the fruition of the olive trees in the next 2024/25 crop year may be in peril.”

Meanwhile, experts have warned of a pos­si­ble out­break of olive dis­ease due to the increased rain­fall across much of Greece.

“We have had a lot of rain in the coun­try,” said Antonis Paraskevopoulos of the agri­cul­tural depart­ment of Trifylia in the Peloponnese. ​“Our area received more than 50 mil­lime­ters of water. It has helped olive oil pro­duc­tion by water­ing [the trees], but the humid­ity and rel­a­tively low tem­per­a­tures require atten­tion for olive fruit fly and gloeospo­rium infes­ta­tions.”

Greece is antic­i­pat­ing a mod­est olive oil yield this crop year pri­mar­ily due to low fruition lev­els, with the over­all pro­duc­tion fore­casted at around 200,000 tons.

The region of Magnesia in cen­tral Greece was inun­dated by the stormy weather, caus­ing dis­tress to local olive oil pro­duc­ers.

“The phe­nom­e­non was very intense in our area, with heavy rain and hail,” mem­bers of the Pelion agri­cul­tural asso­ci­a­tion from the vil­lage of Ano Lechona told Olive Oil Times. ​“Our homes and prop­er­ties were flooded, and so were our olive groves. It is impos­si­ble to assess the dam­age caused to our olive trees at the moment.”

They also said the entire region is expected to yield less olive oil this sea­son than in boun­ti­ful crop years when pro­duc­tion exceeded 7,000 tons.

Storm Daniel also impacted Evia island, the coun­try’s sec­ond-largest island, just a few kilo­me­ters off the main­land in the Aegean Sea.

The north­ern part of the island has been scarred by the wild­fire of August 2021, with local grow­ers strug­gling to breathe new life into their olive groves.

In the vil­lage of Rovies, an area well-known for its exten­sive groves of table olive vari­eties, the com­bined effect of fire and water threat­ened the exis­tence of the local olive asso­ci­a­tion.

“After an hour of tor­ren­tial rain, the nearby river burst its banks and flooded the whole area,” Nicos Vallis, the head of the asso­ci­a­tion, told Olive Oil Times. ​“The fire of 2021 has turned much of the area into a tree­less land­scape with less capac­ity to absorb water. If the rain had con­tin­ued for another hour, our olive pack­ag­ing plant and the rest of our facil­i­ties would have swamped.”

Vallis added that the olive trees in Rovies, mainly of the Konservolia table vari­ety, were unharmed since no hail hit the area. He noted, how­ever, that local pro­duc­ers still bear the brunt of the 2021 wild­fire.

“Many olive pro­duc­ers in Rovies are in the process of mak­ing their olive trees pro­duc­tive again after the destruc­tive fire two years ago, mostly by nur­tur­ing the trees that were not destroyed by the flames,” he said. ​“I am try­ing to con­vert my trees that escaped the fire into wild olive trees for a dif­fer­ent kind of olive oil.”

Scientists con­sider extreme weather events more likely to occur due to anthro­pogenic cli­mate change-related fluc­tu­a­tions in tem­per­a­ture and humid­ity.

“[Humans] are over­heat­ing the atmos­phere glob­ally, and the ocean responds by accu­mu­lat­ing the heat and return­ing it to the atmos­phere as water vapor,” Christos Zerefos, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of geol­ogy and sci­en­tific advi­sor to the Greek gov­ern­ment, told Athens News Agency. ​“If there’s a lot of water vapor and heat in the sea, it can cre­ate a trop­i­cal storm, like Storm Daniel.”

“However, this storm was very extreme,” he said, adding that Greece is unlikely to expe­ri­ence such cat­a­strophic weather again soon. ​“The heat­wave of this sum­mer and storm Daniel are so rare that they will not occur again for 300 to 400 years.”

• Agrotypos
• Athens Voice
• Ilia Liva