In Athens, snowstorm "Elpis" serves up the icy streets and eerie quiet nobody asked for
Snowcropolis! Cute, but also drivers were trapped on main highway between Athens and international airport for several freezing hours...leading to a CEO's resignation and plenty of finger pointing
ATHENS—By the morning of Monday, January 24, everybody had fair warning—for days meteorologists had been talking about a monster of a snowstorm, dubbed Elpis, and within hours not only was the Greek capital transformed into a vast winter wonderland but thousands of drivers—by some accounts as many as 4,500—were trapped in their cars on the main motorway between Athens and its international airport.
Reuters reported that “more than 3,500 people had been evacuated by early Tuesday, some abandoning their cars on foot, while around 1,800 cars remained stuck on the motorway, the capital's main ring-road” adding that people evacuated from the motorway were sheltered overnight at the Athens Airport hotel overnight.
On Wednesday morning, the 26th, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis issued an apology for an “unsuccessful management of the snowstorm.” While not denying the state’s responsibility, he did throw some shade at the private company that manages the Attiki Odos roadway: “Private entities that manage, not with negligible profit, critical infrastructure, have obligations” the PM said.
The Attiki Odos is a super modern highway and also a toll road. On Tuesday, following widespread outrage over the lack of any kind of viable contingency plan to rescue the drivers, the highway operator’s CEO, Bill M. Halkias, tendered his resignation. That it took the Greek Army and Fire Brigade to rescue the trapped drivers, in an operation that continued well into Tuesday, only fanned the flames.
The resignation followed a steady drip of jarring reports on social media of drivers stuck in their vehicles amid freezing temperatures without food, water or heat until well after nightfall, some with severe medical conditions, much of the Greek press had been baying for blood, also pointing to alleged corruption in the roadway concession. Ta Nea talked about “passing the zucchini” —the Greek way to say passing the buck, and while it may be too soon to know where to lay the blame for what could have easily devolved into a real catastrophe, the newspaper quite clearly slams the manner in which central Athens has between Monday and Wednesday become “a dead zone” with transportation broadly hobbled by the snow. Obviously Athens isn’t used to snow and but, as the French say, quand même…it should take more than some flakes for things to grind to a halt.
But Ta Nea was by no means alone in assailing “the state apparatus” as “weak, insufficient or incapable of dealing with the consequences” of the inclement weather. The government has already offered compensation of 2,000 euros to each driver who was stuck on the highway in in the snow for hours—something pretty amazing and that would be the stuff of science fiction in, say, Virginia. But for many in Greece it was a token gesture, and certainly the former prime minister, radical leftist Alexis Tsipras, made no mention of it in this post on Facebook:
The Protothema newspaper went for Attiki Odos’s management with perhaps surprising alacrity: "The lack of... even a contingency plan, may be related to the priorities of Attiki Odos officials,” they wrote. And “a key priority as it seems is to increase profits and distribute as many dividends as possible. Instead of allocating money for maintenance, infrastructure…managers prefer to maximize shareholder profits. In the last 15 years the profits amount to 770 million euros, while many talk about accounting maneuvers, so that through parallel companies…the real profits of the highway are not actually calculated, but are recorded smaller so that the road does not return to the public earlier than 2024, as provided for in the original contract.”
Certainly the Greek taxpayers who bankroll all this deserve answers. And if anyone wants to look for real corruption in transport, they might cast a glance at the the creaky Port Authority of New York and New Jersey: Tri-state area commuters have to pay through the nose for ugly roads that are for the most part falling apart, and having to fork over ten bucks to cross a bridge that was finished in 1964 is both anti-tourism and meets my definition of highway robbery. The Attiki Odos, on other hand, happens to be a beautiful piece of asphalt, at times burrowing via a pair of tunnels through the lower reaches of Mount Hymettus (a historically significant mountain to which I have paid homage in The New York Times’ partner Greek newspaper, Kathimerini) before descending into wide open fields studded with olive trees that straddle the southern fringes of the airport. That mismanagement could lead to suffering on this scale is really a shame.
The international optics of this quasi-crisis and near-catastrophe are not good either—supposing the blizzard had come as a springtime surprise, when in addition to Greek commuters the highway would logically have been filled with taxis and tour buses too? Greece may be a stranger to snowstorms—as Mitsotakis correctly pointed out “the infrastructure of a Mediterranean country is not always adapted to conditions of heavy snowfall.” But given its location and Mediterranean climate, Greece like its neighbors in the region has always been prone to natural disasters. After the snow melts (and after all the mudslinging stops) Greeks will have to decide for themselves whether a company without a viable contingency plan for all emergency situations is truly ready for business.
Don’t be discouraged: Athens is still a fine place to drive!