Prime Minister expresses “deepest sympathy” and “total solidarity”
Portugal’s prime minister Luís Montenegro has today offered the United States “any human and technical resources available that may be useful in fighting” the devastating blazes assailing areas of California.
Expressing his “deepest sympathy and full empathy” in a post on the ‘X’ social network, the PSD leader adds that “in total solidarity, Portugal has made our human and technical firefighting resources available to the United States, insofar as they can be useful to our ally”.
The fires raging in Los Angeles, in the south-west of the United States, since Tuesday have killed at least 10 people and destroyed more than 10,000 homes.
With extraordinarily adverse weather conditions, firefighters are finding it very difficult to fight the flames, which have even borne down on parts of Hollywood. The fires arrived after months without rain, and in the desperation to pump water to combat flames, a number of hydrants have run dry.
It is not certain that Portugal’s assistance will be needed, but certainly authorities on the ground this morning said the situation was still far from being brought under control.
With over a million Portuguese-Americans living in the United States, so far authorities have no reports of deaths or ‘significant property damage’ among the Portuguese-American community in California.
President Marcelo has said that there is a “very strong community of Portuguese-Americans in California, “most of them from the autonomous region of the Azores.
“There are no Portuguese affected in terms of deaths or personal injuries and also from the point of view of significant property damage”, he said yesterday (…) “This is good news within the bad news, which is very worrying, which is the panorama of fires with an intensity that hasn’t been seen for many years.”
Source material: LUSA/
