And despite limited irrefutable proof, they’re likely at least partly right. Islanders have been quick to pin the blame on the ‘nerouládes,’ the businessmen who ship water in large tankers from the comparatively well-resourced Greek mainland to many of the parched Cycladic and Dodecanese islands. “These are not accidents,” a water official reiterated. “You see a whole lot of monkey business everywhere you look,” Greek politician Panagiotis Hatziperos told Alexander Clapp and me when we delved into the situation for Bloomberg in 2021. Though impossible to prove malicious intention in many instances, desalination technicians say that not even subpar maintenance can explain away this volume of problems. On Mykonos, Paros, and a good number of other idyllic islands, desalination plants and other forms of water infrastructure have suffered repeated and ‘inexplicable’ breakdowns in recent years. On that occasion, they set back the completion of the then-under construction project by more than a year. Two years earlier, in January 2020, other – or possibly the same – suspects punctured that pipeline in dozens of places with a drill. In late July, a person or persons unknown detonated a bomb alongside the undersea Salamina-to-Aegina water pipeline in Greece, leaving nothing but traces of a fuse and leaking freshwater.
Greece’s islands might seem like unlikely settings for a wild years-long sabotage campaign, but the explosions tell a different story.
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