Fire extinguisher in hand, a man tries to put out the fire of his charred cars, in the garage of a house also burned. This photo proposed on the cover of Public Tuesday, September 17, bears witness to the hell that many Portuguese are living due to sudden and violent fires in the center and north of the country. “In just two days, as much area burned as in the rest of the year” in Portugal, the newspaper announces in its headline.
In its pages, Public contextualizes this increase, while the area burned in 2024 had been “the weakest of the decade” :
“Until the middle of this month [de septembre]everything seemed to indicate that this year would be benign in terms of rural fires. But the weather conditions, strongly conditioned by the arrival of easterly winds, quickly reversed the trend and caused an explosion of fires.”
The toll already stands at 4 dead and 40 injured. A state of alert has been declared in the country, dozens of homes have burned, particularly in the Aveiro region, an hour south of Porto. On the morning of September 17, 5,000 firefighters were mobilized to fight 107 active fires. The authorities are relaying a situation “very complicated” on the ground and fear that it will get worse in the coming hours.
Forest reform “unfinished”
Portugal also has “requested the support of the European Civil Protection Mechanism”, in order to obtain more air resources, while the country already has around thirty water bombing planes and helicopters.
In his editorial, David Pontes, the director of Public, recalls that since the “tragedy of 2017” (year in which a hundred Portuguese died in fires), “Much work has been done, but forest management remains unfinished”. “We are still far from solving a problem that global warming has only made worse,” notes the editorialist, who believes that forest reform should be a national priority.
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