Secretary General for Civil Protection

Fire Lieutenant General (Ret.), Vassilios Papageorgiou

Ηe was born in 1959 in Lantzoi, Ilia, Greece. He is married and a father of two children. In 1982, he enlisted in the Hellenic Fire Corps and in 1986 graduated from the Fire Academy Officers' School with the rank of Fire Second Lieutenant. He holds a Master's Degree in Environmental, Disaster and Crisis Management Strategies from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

During his career he served in the Fire Department of Kos and Rhodes, as well as in many Fire Departments of the Athens and Piraeus Administration. For seven years, he served as an Operations Officer at the Special Disaster Response Unit in Elefsina (1st SDRU), until 2009 when he was appointed Commanding Officer of the Unit. In the same year he was also appointed Commanding Officer of the Fire Department of West Attica.

In January 2011, he was assigned Commanding Officer of the Attica Regional Fire Services Administration and in November 2012 he was appointed Deputy Chief of the Hellenic Fire Corps. In November 2013, by decision of the Government Council for Foreign Affairs and Defense (KYSEA), he was appointed Chief of the H.F.C, where he served until 2016. 

He participated in search and rescue operations after the Attica earthquake in 1999, in major forest firefighting operations, as well as in the major firefighting operation at the chemicals company “Chyma S.A.”. He also took part in the search and rescue mission following the devastating earthquake in Iran, as well as in international relief forest firefighting missions in Israel and Cyprus. He has attended several training programs in France, Turkey, Italy and Belgium. He has participated in two exercises of the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism.