The fires that are enraged in Portugal made a first deadly victim this Friday, August 15 in Guarda in the east of the country, announced the President of the Republic, indicating that he interrupted his vacation and returned to follow the “serious situation of rural fires.”
“The President of the Republic presented, at the beginning of the afternoon, his sincere condolences to the president of the municipality of Guarda, for the death of former mayor Carlos Dâmaso, victim of a fire that was fighting in his commune, asking that they be transmitted to his family,” explains a statement published in the presidency site.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa then participated in a meeting in the National Emergency and Civil Protection authority, the press release continued, while Portugal is the victim of a wave of fires that began more than three weeks ago.
Thousands of mobilized firefighters
Several thousand firefighters have been working hard for days to fight the various houses of the country. The Government has also activated, as its neighboring Spain, “the Civil Protection mechanism of the European Union” and requested the sending of four Canadair aircraft to remain in the national territory until August 18, “said the Presidency of the Republic in X.
After the mortal fires of 2017, which left more than one hundred dead (119), Portugal has multiplied by ten investments in prevention and doubled its budget to combat forest fires.
Therefore, the Iberian country had reduced the burned surface every year on average during the 2018-2023 period to 54,500 hectares, one third of what was during the period 2001-2017, according to the Government Agency for Forest Fire Management (AGIF).
But the fires that devastated Portugal for three days of September 2024 only reversed this downward trend, with a burned annual area of 138,000 hectares, four times larger than in 2023. The year 2024 was marked by the death of 12 people, nine firefighters and three civilians, the heavy loss since the dark year of 2017.
Source: BFM TV
