As Central Europe is drowning under water and Storm Boris, Portugal is on fire, in the grip of the worst wildfires of its summer. The acceleration of climate change is already here, before our eyes. And it has claimed victims. In Poland and the Czech Republic, the toll Floods kill at least 19. In Portugal, the toll is barely less significant with already seven dead in the whole country. This Tuesday, three firefighters died while fighting a forest fire near Nelas in the north of Portugal. These two women and this man died trapped by the flames while they were fighting the fire. An employee of a forestry company, burned to death while trying to retrieve tools, a volunteer firefighter, died of a fainting spell and two people who suffered a heart attack have also lost their lives due to these fires.
Fanned by strong winds and intense heat, around fifty fires remained active on Tuesday. The most worrying front concerns “a complex of four fires” with a total perimeter “greater than 100 km” raging in the Aveiro region (north), said a civil protection official, Mario Silvestre, on site. “There are still villages in danger and, during this day, there will certainly be villages to defend,” added this commander, specifying that the authorities had carried out around fifty evacuations during the night from Monday to Tuesday.
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. On Monday evening, the authorities estimated the area destroyed by these fires at some 10,000 hectares of forests and scrubland in the municipalities of Agueda, Albergaria-a-Velha, Sever do Vouga and Oliveira de Azeméis. Colossal losses, which already exceed the total for the rest of the summer. The maximum alert triggered on Saturday was maintained at least until Thursday.
Planes from France, Spain, Italy
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.
Portugal had so far had a relatively quiet summer on the fire front, with 10,300 hectares burned until the end of August, a third of that of 2023 and seven times less than the average of the last ten years. But the last few days have revived memories of the deadly fires of June and October 2017, which left more than a hundred dead in total.
Efforts to better fight fire
Since then, the country has increased its investment in prevention tenfold and doubled its budget for fighting fires. Experts believe that increasingly intense heatwaves and droughts are consequences of climate change and are promoting forest fires.
The use of eucalyptus, a particularly flammable species, to feed the paper industry is also clearly criticized. This species, originally from Australia, now represents a quarter of Portugal’s total forest area.