Fires in Portugal: 3,700 firefighters face deadly forest fires

Thousands of firefighters were deployed in Portugal on Tuesday to put out forest fires that have killed at least three people and ravaged an area in three days that was larger than the rest of the summer.

Fanned by stifling heat and violent winds, the three largest fires, concentrated in the Aveiro region (north), had already burned some 10,000 hectares by Monday evening, as much as the surface area that had burned during the rest of the summer, according to a report from civil protection.

Across the country, some fifty active fires mobilized more than 3,700 firefighters, more than a thousand vehicles and about twenty planes or helicopters on Tuesday. The “alert situation”, in effect since Saturday afternoon due to a fire risk deemed “maximum” in a large part of the country, was extended until Thursday evening.

The Lisbon authorities have activated the European Civil Protection Mechanism to obtain eight additional water bomber planes. After the two Canadairs that arrived from Spain the day before, planes made available by France, Italy and Greece are expected during the day.

In the municipality of Albergaria-a-Velha, a 28-year-old Brazilian employed by a forestry company died of burns, trapped by flames while trying to retrieve tools. Another person suffered a heart attack on Monday and, the day before, a volunteer firefighter who was fighting a fire near Oliveira de Azeméis, in the Aveiro region, died of a sudden illness during a meal break.

This series of forest fires, which had been raging since the weekend before getting worse on Monday, also left at least forty people injured, including 33 firefighters, according to the latest figures from the authorities. Several roads are still closed in the districts of Aveiro, Viseu, Vila Real, Braga and Porto, in the north of the country, as well as in the region of Coimbra (centre). According to experts interviewed by the weekly “Expresso”, Monday brought together in the northern half of the country the worst weather conditions in terms of fire risk since 2001.

“We arrived in September with brushwood as dry as straw and, with these weather conditions, any negligence has a high probability of generating a large fire,” explained José Miguel Cardoso Pereira, researcher at the Forestry Studies Center of the Higher Institute of Agronomy of the University of Lisbon.

Portugal had so far had a relatively quiet summer on the fire front, with 10,300 hectares burned by the end of August, a third of that of 2023 and seven times less than the average of the last 10 years.

But the last few days have revived memories of the deadly fires of June and October 2017, which killed more than a hundred people. Since then, the Iberian country has increased its investment in prevention tenfold and doubled its budget for fighting forest fires. Experts consider that the increase in heat waves and their increasing duration and intensity are the consequences of climate change. The Iberian Peninsula is being hit hard by this global warming, while the heat waves and droughts it causes promote forest fires.