Heart-stopping video shows the moment two firefighting helicopters crashed in mid-air, killing two crew members, after they were deployed to battle a raging wildfire in Greece on Sunday.The terrifying footage obtained by Kefalonia Press shows one of the helicopters clip the rotor of the second, causing it to burst into flames and plummet to the ground.The helicopters had been leased by the local fire department to combat a blaze in Psatha, west of Athens, BBC News reported.Both helicopters had two people on board at the time, according to the fire service. The two-man crew of one of the helicopters were killed, a fire department spokesman said. “The pilots... were taken unconscious to hospital, where their death was confirmed,” the fire department’s director of communications Vassilis Vathrakogiannis said in a televised address, following a search and rescue operation,The cause of the crash remains under investigation.It comes as Greece, along with numerous European countries, continues to battle wildfires brought on by weeks of scorching temps.Greece on Sunday faced multiple fronts and a growing damage toll after a week of wildfires devastated over 12,000 hectares of forest and agricultural land, experts said. The National Observatory’s climate tracker meteo.gr said early estimates indicated that over 6,500 hectares (16,000 acres) had been burned in separate fires on the Gulf of Corinth which also swept through the popular coastal village of Porto Germeno near Athens. Porto Germeno and other villages were evacuated when the fire broke out on Friday but local authorities say scores of homes were damaged or destroyed. Firefighters have faced dozens of fires daily and Greece’s Civil Protection Minister Evangelos Tournas on Saturday said the fire department had been “pushed to its limits”. Earlier in the week on the Greek island of Crete, fires burned thousands of acres of land, forcing more than 8,000 people to be temporarily evacuated.Some 500 people, mostly tourists, had to be evacuated during a blaze in central Greece on Friday. Blazes have also broken out on the islands of Paros, Andros and Kalymnos.Three firefighters also died this week in the line of duty, two in Crete and one in the Peloponnese.Gale-force winds created “extremely difficult conditions resulting in many cases where aircraft either cannot draw water or cannot carry out drops due to extreme turbulence”, Mr Tournas said. Though the winds eased late on Saturday, the greater Athens area and nearby Voiotia and the island of Evia were under near maximum fire risk on Sunday, the civil protection ministry said. Nearly 500 firefighters were battling blazes in the Porto Germeno area, some 70kms northwest of Athens, the fire department said. Some 100 firefighters were fighting another blaze in Aigialia in the northern Peloponnese.Hit hard by the climate crisis like the rest of the Mediterranean region, Greece is plagued by wildfires every summer due to high temperatures, frequent heatwaves and drought.– With The NY Post and AFP