Eva Deschamps / July 11, 2022
Up to 2,800 firefighters were mobilized on Sunday to try to overcome a series of forest fires that ravaged Portugal, where scorching temperatures have prompted the government to increase the mobilization of rescue services by declaring a state of contingency.
The most important fire was raging since Thursday in the region of Ourém (center) and mobilized alone nearly 700 firefighters. The fire arrived at 50 meters of the last house of the village (...). Up there everything burned, Donzilia Marques told AFP, pointing to the hills between her hamlet of Travessa de Almogadel and the town of Freixianda. Evacuated from her home the evening before, this 76-year-old pensioner was able to return Sunday morning, relieved to discover that no house had been damaged. The fire, which would have ravaged at least 1,500 hectares of vegetation according to an initial estimate, has however destroyed at least two houses, according to the emergency services, which reported other temporary evacuations of villages threatened by the flames. Another blaze mobilizing 450 firefighters was raging since Friday a few kilometers away, after it broke out in the municipality of Pombal, also located at the confluence of the districts of Leiria and Santarém.
The fires of the last few days have caused about 40 minor injuries among firefighters and the population, but most of the victims were treated on the spot for symptoms of intoxication or exhaustion, according to a balance sheet provided Sunday evening by the national commander of civil protection, Andre Fernandes. For the third consecutive day, the peacekeepers had to deal with more than a hundred fire starts across the country, while the extreme weather peak is still to come, Fernandes stressed.
Thermometers have already reached 44 degrees Celsius in some places, and the Portuguese Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures will continue to rise until the middle of next week. After this high-risk weekend, according to Prime Minister Antonio Costa, who cancelled a trip to Mozambique to monitor the situation as closely as possible, the Portuguese government decided to declare a state of contingency between Monday and Friday, to raise the level of mobilization of emergency services and the restrictions they can impose. Lisbon has also asked the European Union to activate its common civil protection mechanism, obtaining the dispatch of two water-bombing aircraft stationed in Spain.
While Interior Minister Jose Luis Carneiro said Portugal was facing the worst conjunction of factors since the June and October 2017 fires, which killed more than 100 people, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa argued that the level of emergency preparedness was not comparable.
The fires that are multiplying across the globe are associated with various phenomena anticipated by scientists due to global warming. The increase in temperature, the multiplication of heat waves and the decrease in precipitation in places is an ideal combination for the development of fires.