Minister for economy and territorial cohesion, Castro Almeida, admitted today that damage caused by Storm Kristin is “significantly greater” than the losses recorded in the wildfires of 2024 or 2025.
“I was doing my calculations, of course, as I listened to the description of what was being done, and I am coming up with a figure in my head, but these are very rough estimates. What I can tell you is that the figures are very high compared to the losses caused by the fires in 2025 or 2024,” the minister told journalists during a visit to Leiria Fire Station (which also suffered considerable damages).
“From today’s meeting, I was unable to provide a figure for the amount of damage. The overwhelming majority of local authorities are understandably reluctant to give a figure for the amount of damage in each district. Therefore, it is impossible to arrive at an overall figure,” he said.
Adding that the meeting with local authorities allowed him to “understand that the scale of the problem is really very large”, the minister acknowledged that the north and south of the country “have no idea what is happening in the centre” – especially in the Leiria region, where several districts are experiencing “very serious” problems.
Castro Almeida acknowledged that, due to the fact that “many factories” have no roofs and are “unable to work”, the situation “will affect production chains”, which “will be a serious problem”.
Equally, he said the impact of the depression will force a change in priorities in terms of council investment.
“One of the things we have been seeing is that there are projects being built with funding from the PRR (Recovery and Resilience Plan)], which have strict deadlines to be met, and this will make it difficult to meet those deadlines,” he acknowledged.
Saying that he had asked local authorities to bring these situations to the attention of the government, so that the government could “obtain Brussels’ understanding for these deadlines, which are very strict”, Castro Almeida noted: “If a school is being built and the crane collapses and the roofs collapse and what was built collapses, we will necessarily have to change these deadlines.”
The passage of the Kristin depression through mainland Portugal in the early hours of Wednesday morning has left a trail of destruction, causing at least five deaths, several injuries and numerous displaced persons. Marinha Grande local council has also reported another fatality in the district.
Fallen trees and structures, road and transport service disruptions, particularly railway lines, school closures, and power, water, and communication outages are the main material consequences of the storm, which battered the districts of Leiria, Coimbra and Santarém to the extent that some areas were left looking like war zones.
The government has declared a state of calamity to run for around 60 municipalities – a number that may increase – until February 1. That deadline means nothing in terms of the clearing up that is required, which is expected to take weeks.
Source material: LUSA
