Portugal’s wildfire situation this morning is that almost 3,000 firefighters are active, tackling above all four ‘serious blazes’ in the north and centre: in Sátão, Cinfães, Trancoso and Arganil.
After days in which political leaders seemed ‘less than connected’ to the ongoing drama, President Marcelo yesterday emerged from his meeting with the prime minister in Faro, to stress that the country’s fires were, for now, the overriding priority. Questions about the health service/ changes to entry requirements for immigrants were not, he said, issues that were worrying nationals most at this point: the fact that so many villages are being assailed by walls of raging flames is the only subject he wanted to talk about – and to this end he stressed that tomorrow, Friday, is the day that authorities are most worried about.
There will be what Marcelo described as “a convergence of objective conditions, meteorological and physical, which could point to a situation very conducive to the persistence and worsening of fires”, particularly the fire in Sátão.
Paying tribute to the country’s firefighters, he said “the effort being required is brutal, because it involves days and nights in conditions that continue over time”. He also ‘congratulated’ political forces ‘that have refrained from using the fire situation in their election campaigns’ (referring to the municipal elections coming in October), stressing this was not a warning, it was genuine relief.
The prime minister said not a word while the president spoke, but has since stressed that the government is not yet ready to call for help from the European Union. This is also because the situation in other countries, particularly Greece and Spain, is also dire. Spain, for example, has just called for outside reinforcements through the European Civil Protection Mechanism.
With so much still to combat – and winds making terrible situations even worse – PS leader José Luís Carneiro (himself a former Minister of Internal Administration) has called on the government to declare a Situation of Contingency, which he believes would enable the mobilisation of means “in a way that otherwise might be more difficult”.
As it is, fire stations throughout the country are dispatching teams north to bolster those utterly exhausted by days of constant combat.
For now, the latest data coming through points to 75,000 hectares of land having been consumed by fire this year – more than half of which burned only in the last three weeks. Estimates from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), which is based on satellite imagery from the European Copernicus program, shows that Portugal is the third country in the European Union with the most burned areas this year, after Spain (148,205) and Romania (123,816).
