Deadly Portugal wildfires force new evacuations

Agueda: Deadly wildfires raging in Portugal forced more people to flee their homes as crews battled dozens of blazes Wednesday in the north of the country.

Stifling heat and strong winds over the weekend fanned a spate of forest fires across the north and centre of the country that have left five people dead, including three firefighters and a volunteer firefighter.

An earlier toll of seven was revised downwards Wednesday. Head of the civil protection service Andre Fernandes said the deaths of two people who had died of heart attacks could not be directly attributed to the fire.

“The meteorological situation is still very unfavourable and we are not expecting a significant reduction in the risk of forest fires over the next 48 hours,” he added.

Officials say another 59 people have been injured in the fires, 10 of them seriously.

Civil protection authorities listed 42 active fires on its website on Wednesday and said they had mobilised around 3,900 firefighters, more than 1,000 vehicles and around 30 firefighting aircraft.

France has said it is sending two more water-bombing planes to add to those already sent. Italy and Spain have also sent help, and Morocco has said it will be sending two aircraft.

In the Gondomar municipality, just outside Porto, authorities carried out more evacuations on Tuesday night.

Firefighters battling blazes in Arouca in the hard-hit Aveiro region told local media outlets the situation there was “uncontrollable”.

Widespread destruction

Around 20,000 hectares (49,400 acres) of vegetation have burned in the region, south of Porto, since Monday, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis).

Around 10 separate blazes have passed the 3,000-hectare threshold since the fires began over the weekend, the Effis data showed.

Images captured by the Copernicus satellite on Tuesday showed long trails of smoke drifting westward across the Atlantic from multiple fires in the north.

From the heights of the village of Veiga, in the district of Agueda, residents looked on in horror Tuesday evening as the flames approached a house next to a eucalyptus grove, AFP journalists saw.

The three firefighters who died on Tuesday were caught when their vehicle was trapped by the flames, civil protection authorities said.

A 28-year-old Brazilian who worked for a forestry company died on Monday after he became trapped by the flames as he tried to collect some tools from his workplace.

And a volunteer firefighter died after taking ill during a break from battling the flames.

Lisbon has increased fire-prevention funding 10-fold and doubled the budget to fight wildfires since deadly blazes in 2017 claimed hundreds of lives.

The Iberian peninsula is particularly vulnerable to global warming, with heatwaves and drought exposing the region to blazes.