Owner at a loss; has no insurance: “All my investment, all my work, is here”
Just a small indication of the lives ruined by these fires has come in the story carried by SIC Notícias today of a car workshop in Travessa do Tronco, in Foz do Sousa, Gondomar, “one of the places hardest hit by the flames” that have been raging in the district.
A total of around 40 vehicles were completely destroyed. The owner of the workshop, Rúben Rodrigues, managed to save 12.
“It all happened very quickly” – there were no firefighters in sight”, he told SIC. “I grabbed the hose straight away, went to call (the employees) inside, got fire extinguishers, moved the cars as far away as possible (…) I tried to save everything, but it was impossible”.
Rúben has four employees. He was one of the last to leave the blazing workshop. “This is my life. All my investment and my work is here”.
And now he has an impossible nightmare: who is going to pay for all the cars that burnt?
“My phone won’t stop ringing. Some understand, but it’s normal for people to want their property (…) there’s no insurance”, he laments.
Little has been said this far about the causes behind these fires – far too many of them having started after dark. Without doubt arson has been involved – hence the PM’s words earlier this week, insisting the government “will not forget, will not forgive” those responsible for “these atrocities”.
But can the “special teams of investigators” that the PM spoke of make any difference?
Paulo Loba, president of the Syndicate of Magistrates at the Public Prosecutor’s Office has his doubts. Arson “is a crime that is difficult to investigate. A specialised team isn’t going to resolve the problem”, Loba tells SIC. The plan is positive, he stresses, but it won’t prevent forest fires.
The PM’s pledge nonetheless is: “We cannot forgive those who have no forgiveness. We can’t forgive criminal attitudes that are at the root of many of the fires that have occurred in recent days. We know that there are natural phenomena and we know that there are circumstances of negligence that converge to cause forest fires to break out. But there are too many coincidences” in the fires that have transported Portugal’s name across the world this week, for all the wrong reasons.
Meantime, news from the firefighting front is ‘like the curate’s egg’: there are some good parts (with several fires dominated, and/ or in stages of resolution), and some not so good (like Castro Daire, which still has at least three fronts raging).
natasha.donn@portugalresident.com
