Three firefighters died on Tuesday while fighting a forest fire in northern Portugal, which has been hit since the weekend by fires that have ravaged a larger area than those burned during the rest of the summer, bringing the death toll to seven.
These three firefighters, two women and a man, were trapped by the flames near Nelas, in the region of Viseu (north), the national commander of civil protection André Fernandes told the press.
On Tuesday afternoon, around fifty active fires, fanned by violent winds, were still mobilising some 4,200 firefighters across the country, where the disasters left a total of seven dead and around fifty injured.
“There are still villages in danger”
The other victims of the disasters are a 28-year-old Brazilian employed by a forestry company, who died of burns on Monday while trying to retrieve tools, two people who suffered heart attacks and a volunteer firefighter who died of a sudden illness on the sidelines of an operation.
The most worrying front concerns “a complex of four fires” with a total perimeter “greater than 100 km” raging in the region of Aveiro (north), said on site Tuesday another civil protection official, Mario Silvestre.
“There are still villages in danger and, during the day, there will certainly be villages to defend,” added the commander, specifying that the authorities had carried out around fifty evacuations during the night from Monday to Tuesday.
“Maximum” risk
On Monday evening, authorities estimated the area destroyed by these fires at some 10,000 hectares of forest and scrubland in the municipalities of Agueda, Albergaria-a-Velha, Sever do Vouga and Oliveira de Azeméis, as much as the area that burned in Portugal during the rest of the summer.
The “alert situation”, in effect since Saturday afternoon due to a risk of fire deemed “maximum” in a large part of the northern half of the country, has been 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 were expected during the day on Tuesday.
Visible from the municipality of Agueda, in the district of Aveiro, the Spanish aircraft resumed service on Tuesday morning. Making rotations approximately every half hour, they were refueling in the Pateiro de Fermentelos lagoon, AFP journalists noted. A cloud of black smoke rose from one of the banks of the body of water, spreading its harsh odor in the surrounding air.
Memory of 2017
According to specialists 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.
This resulted in some 160 fires breaking out, a dozen of which subsequently grew to significant proportions, making it very difficult to fight the flames.
“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.
Experts believe that increasingly intense heat waves and droughts are consequences of climate change and are fuelling forest fires.
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 in total. Since then, the country has increased investment in prevention tenfold and doubled its budget for fighting forest fires.
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