Fire engine turns over in Cinfães
A brief run-down of today’s fire situation sees fires concentrated, as they were yesterday, in the north and centre of the country.
There are currently five major incidents: Leiria, Arouca, Cinfães, Penafiel and Ponte da Barca. But there are other smaller fires also ongoing. As reports have said earlier this week, there are fires breaking out ‘all the time’: the majority of them started on purpose.
Television stations have been highlighting the number of people arrested so far this year (26), saying it is much higher than in previous years (particularly since we have only reached the end of July…)
Mishaps today include the turning over of a fire engine in Cinfães (near Tarouquela). No injuries reported.
A Canadair heavy-duty water bomber has also been forced to ditch into the Douro river near Gondomar, due to a technical fault.
The exhausted mayor of Ponte da Barca has seen his appeals for more fighting aircraft partially heeded, and currently has five helping the hundreds of firefighters and appliances still tackling flames in the borough after more than five days. He concedes he needs more, but is clearly irritated by the way in which a government of his own political persuasion has been treating this fire.
Ponte da Barca is the longest running of the current fires, and has already seen around 6,000 hectares of landscape ‘consumed by flames’.
Mayor Augusto Marinho’s greatest fear right now is that flames reach the villages of Sobredo and Lourido, explains SIC.
There is this ‘feeling’ in the air that the new Minister for Internal Administration is not prepared for this degree of challenge.
At the age of 68, Maria Lúcia Amaral comes to the job after years of being the country’s Ombudsman. There is no doubt that she is extremely capable, but dealing with ‘complaints’ and dealing with raging wildfires require very different skill sets.
According to Eduardo Cabrita, a former Socialist minister of interior administration – and great chum of former prime minister António Costa, the centre-right government of Luís Montenegro is showing “it is incapable”, both of organising effective prevention, and effective combat.
Mr Cabrita had a great deal of bad luck during his tenure as Minister of Interior Administration, but he had an impeccable record when it came to the way the government handled wildfires on his watch – and he told SIC last night that, in his opinion, the current administration doesn’t know what it is doing.
Meantime, the wind continues to pose difficulties for firefighters, who have been working now at full throttle for the best part of a week. Changes in direction are the most ‘complicated’ to deal with, as they require complete changes of tactics, suddenly. This has happened this evening as the Ponte da Barca fire has started threating the village of Paradamonte.
updating…
