Three firefighters died on Tuesday, September 17, while battling a forest fire in northern Portugal, which has been ravaged since this weekend by fires that have devastated a larger area than those burned during the rest of the summer, raising the death toll to seven victims.
The national civil protection commander, André Fernandes, said the three firefighters, two women and a man, were trapped by the flames near Nelas, in the Viseu region.
On Tuesday afternoon, around 50 active fires, fanned by strong winds, were still mobilising some 4,200 firefighters across the country, where the catastrophes caused a total of seven deaths and around 50 injuries.
The other victims of the disasters are a 28-year-old Brazilian employee of a forestry company (burned to death on Monday 16 September while trying to retrieve tools), two people who suffered heart attacks and a volunteer firefighter (died of a sudden illness, outside of an operation).
10,000 hectares of forests destroyed
The most worrying concerns of the front “a complex of four fires” of a total perimeter “more than 100 kilometers” The fire is causing havoc in the Aveiro region in the north, said another Civil Protection official, Mario Silvestre, on Tuesday.
“There are still villages in danger and, during this day, there will surely be villages to defend”The commander added, adding that the authorities had carried out around fifty evacuations during the night from Monday to Tuesday.
On Monday afternoon, the authorities estimated that 10,000 hectares of forest and scrubland had been destroyed by these fires in the municipalities of Agueda, Albergaria-a-Velha, Sever do Vouga and Oliveira de Azeméis, the same amount of land burned in Portugal during the rest of the summer.
There “alert situation”effective from Saturday afternoon due to a considered fire risk “maximum” in much of the northern half of the country, extended into Thursday evening.
Fact Sheet
“Human warmth”
How to face the climate challenge? Every week, our best articles on the topic.
Record
Lisbon authorities have activated the European Civil Protection Mechanism to obtain eight additional water bomber aircraft. Following the arrival of the two Canadairs from Spain the day before, aircraft from France, Italy and Greece were expected to arrive on Tuesday.
Visible from the town of Águeda, in the Aveiro district, the Spanish aircraft resumed service on Tuesday morning. Rotating approximately every half hour, they refueled at the Pateiro de Fermentelos lagoon, Agence France-Presse journalists reported.
A cloud of black smoke rose from one of the banks of the body of water, spreading its strong smell through the surrounding air.
2017 Report
According to experts interviewed by the weekly Expreso, the northern half of the country experienced the worst weather conditions in terms of fire risk since 2001 on Monday.
This led to 160 fires, a dozen of which later reached significant proportions, making it very difficult to fight the flames.
Experts believe that increasingly intense heat waves and droughts are consequences of climate change and promote forest fires.
Portugal has so far experienced a relatively calm summer on the fire front, with a burnt area of 10,300 hectares by the end of August, a third of that of 2023 and seven times less than the average of the last ten years.
But recent days have revived memories of the deadly fires of June and October 2017, which left more than a hundred people dead in total. Since then, the country has increased its investment in prevention tenfold and doubled its budget for fighting forest fires.
