Portugal has managed to control all the forest fires that have ravaged the north and centre of the country this week, razing some 100,000 hectares of vegetation, emergency services announced on Friday 20 September. The fires have killed five people (including four firefighters) – not seven, as reported by the Portuguese emergency services earlier in the week – and injured around a hundred more, fourteen of them seriously.
“All the situations that were still active yesterday and early this morning have been brought under control”said the national commander of civil protection, André Fernandes, at a press conference.
While the drop in temperatures and the arrival of rains have helped extinguish the fires, more intense rains risk causing landslides in the areas affected by the fires in the coming days, he warned.
Since Saturday, firefighters have had to tackle more than a thousand fires, fuelled by the stifling heat and violent winds sweeping across Portugal.
Dozens of these fires have occurred, especially in the Aveiro region (north), where four outbreaks spread over a perimeter of 100 kilometres and destroyed more than 20,000 hectares of vegetation, according to an estimate provided on Thursday by the European Observatory Copernicus.
120,000 hectares burned
Across the country, the area burned by fires since the beginning of the year already amounts to more than 120,000 hectares: 60% forests, 29% scrubland and 11% agricultural land, according to data from the National Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Forests (ICNF).
The vast majority of this damage was caused by the fires this week, as the area burned by the end of August barely exceeded 10,000 hectares.
The death toll in 2024 is the highest since the dark year of 2017, when the burnt surface reached 500,000 hectares. The fires of June and October 2017 also caused the deaths of more than a hundred people.
The government declared a day of national mourning on Friday and thanked France, Spain, Italy and Morocco for sending a dozen water bomber planes as reinforcements.
