Greek port city in a state of emergency over flood of dead fish

Athens: The port city of Volos in central Greece declared a state emergency following an inundation of dead fish that local residents say could threat...

Athens: The port city of Volos in central Greece declared a state emergency following an inundation of dead fish that local residents say could threaten their livelihoods, the state news agency announced Saturday.

The month-long emergency declaration issued by the climate ministry's secretary general of civil protection, Vassilis Papageorgiou, will inject funding and resources to speed up the cleaning of the Pagasetic Gulf port where tons of dead fish have piled up along the coast and in rivers, according to Athens News Agency.

It is the second environmental catastrophe to hit the port of Volos, a three-and-a-half-hour drive north of Athens, after catastrophic floods hit the Thessaly region last year.

Those floods refilled a nearby lake that had been drained in 1962 a bid to fight malaria, swelling it to three times its normal size.

"After the storms Daniel and Elias last autumn, around 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of plains in Thessaly were flooded, and various freshwater fish were carried by rivers" to the sea,