BBC — Four people have been found dead and a woman is missing after torrential rain caused flash flooding in Greece.
All four victims were in the southern Peloponnese and all were senior citizens: an 80-year-old woman who lived alone in an apartment in Kalamata; a 62-year-old woman with mobility problems in the village of Pidima; a 90-year-old man in the village of Thouria; and another elderly man, whose age was not disclosed, whose body was found some 150 meters from his home in a rural part of Laconia.
Another woman was missing after abandoning her car in floods in Thessaloniki.
The floods destroyed homes and businesses and swept cars out to sea.
Emergency services rescued a Romanian woman and her two children at Igoumenitsa on the north-west coast.
The flooding hit towns and cities from Thessaloniki in the north-east to Sparta in the south.
Pictures shared on social media showed vehicles stacked on top of each other in narrow streets in Kalamata, the second most populous city in the southern Peloponnese region.
Kalamata Mayor Panagiotis Nikas told Reuters news agency that he had “never seen anything like it”.
“About 140mm of rain fell in an hour this morning. Can you imagine that?” he said.
The flooding was so severe that cars were washed out to sea on the outskirts of the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki.
South of the city, at Mihaniona, rescue workers were searching for a woman in her fifties whose car was found abandoned after her husband said she had become trapped by rising waters.
In October 2015 flash flooding in Athens swept away cars and motorbikes and caused a building to collapse.
