Chania: two women found dead at two beaches

Two elderly women lost their lives on the morning of Wednesday 19 August at two different beaches in the Chania regional unit, according to ERT. In the first incident, an 80-year-old Greek woman was pulled unconscious from the sea in the western bay of Agioi Apostoloi, in the Municipality of Chania. She was taken by EKAV ambulance to Chania General Hospital, where she was pronounced dead. A second incident followed shortly afterwards, when a 79-year-old foreign national was also pulled unconscious from the sea off Kolymvari, in the Municipality of Platanias, and taken to the same hospital, where she too was pronounced dead. The names of the two women are not being made public.

In both cases the preliminary inquiry is being carried out by the local port authorities, which have ordered a post-mortem examination at the Forensic Service of Crete. This is the standard procedure when a death occurs at sea and the causes are not obvious from the outset. According to reports citing information from the authorities, the two incidents were about fifteen minutes apart, while one possibility being examined is that the deaths were due to pathological causes that developed while the two women were in the water rather than to drowning. ERT’s report does not refer to a cause of death; that question will be answered only by the forensic findings.

The distinction also matters for how the incident is read locally. The coasts of the Municipality of Chania and the Municipality of Platanias take most of the regional unit’s beach traffic in August, with a strong presence of both residents and older visitors, who choose to swim in the early morning hours. Every such death brings back the same practical question: how quickly a swimmer in difficulty is spotted, whether there is a lifeguard on that particular beach, and the distance to the nearest EKAV unit. It has not been made known whether the two beaches had lifeguard cover at the time of the incidents, nor who alerted the authorities.

The next step is the completion of the post-mortems and of the preliminary inquiries by the port authorities of Chania and Platanias. Until then any link between the two incidents remains hypothetical: closeness in time does not imply a common cause, as these are two different beaches, two different municipalities and two independent procedures. This is the busiest period of the year for the regional unit’s beaches, with Nea Chora returning its central beach to the public after a clean-up operation. More from the area on the Chania page.