Visiting a slowly mopping-up Alcácer do Sal today, President Marcelo stressed the need for a national catastrophe fund, roughly 10 days since finance minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento revealed that the government wants to create one.
Marcelo was talking in the context of a visit very much designed to ‘keep the pressure up on the government’ to get vital recovery support through to people with minimum delay.
As Alcácer’s mayor Clarisse Campos explained, the longer businesses have to wait, the less likelihood that they will ‘survive’ – and this would have a negative knock-on effect for the local community.
And, just as Miranda Sarmento explained when he spoke about the ‘catastrophe fund’ – something other European countries, like France and Spain, already have – these funds take time to build up. They do not ‘appear’ from one minute to the next. Thus, the help that stricken communities need now, as a result of the battering by an ‘express train of storms’, will have to come from other sources/ means.
The government’s €2.5 billion package, announced in the wake of Storm Kristin, has already been widely accepted as ‘nowhere near enough’. For the time being, however, the total for damages sustained as a result of these last few weeks of bad weather has not been calculated – given that ‘consequences’ (namely landslides) are not only ‘still happening’, warn Civil Protection sources, but likely to continue for at least a week.
