Rains, wind help tame wildfires in Spain, Portugal
OVERNIGHT rain and winds helped firefighters tame wildfires that devoured homes and people in their cars, leaving 36 dead in Portugal with four also killed in blazes in northern Spain.
Portugal’s civil protection agency said Tuesday that the 15 biggest fires had been brought under control, adding that seven people were still missing as the country began three days of national mourning for the victims.
The deaths, which included a onemonth-old baby, came four months after 64 people were killed in the deadliest fire in the country’s history in June.
“We went through absolute hell, it was horrible. There was fire everywhere,” a resident of the town of Penacova, near Lousa, told RTP television.
In a village in the commune of Vouzela, in the northern district of Viseu, people used water hoses to try to fight the flames as several homes were consumed.
“Everything happened in 45 minutes, the fire came at the foot of the village and spread at an incredible rate,” resident Jose Morais told AFP. “I had never seen anything like that before. It felt like the end of the world. Everyone fled”.
The blazes which broke out over the weekend were blamed on arsonists and fanned by Hurricane Ophelia. Lisbon declared a state of emergency in areas north of the Tagus river which effectively slices the country in half.
The civil protection agency said that about 50 teams and more than 5,000 firefighters remained deployed and that a red alert in place since Sunday would remain in place until 2000 GMT yesterday.
“We will this morning review the measures on the ground,” Paulo Santos from the civil protection agency said on TSF radio.
But rail services resumed yesterday in the country’s north after being suspended on Sunday.
Fallen electricity pylons and abandoned cars were left lying in roads.
“Most of the victims were killed in their cars, but we also found them inside their houses,” the mayor of the town of Oliveira do Hospital, Jose Carlos Alexandrino, said on public television RTP.
“The whole city looked like a ball of fire, surrounded by flames on all sides,” he said.
Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa reaffirmed his pledges to prevent new tragedies by carrying out “fundamental reforms” in forest management and firefighting.
“After this year, nothing should remain as it was before,” he said.
A report by experts unveiled last week following the deadly June fires pinpointed several problems that hampered efforts to contain the blaze, including the fact that firefighters, the majority of them volunteers, were not sufficiently trained.
They said the army should play a greater role in disaster management and underscored that emergency services workers faced communication problems after emergency network phone masts burned down.