30 killed as wildfires rage in Portugal, Spain

Lisbon asks for international help fighting 145 blazes

At least 30 people died in wildfires raging through parched farmlands and forests in Portugal and neighboring Spain on Sunday and Monday, officials said.

Authorities said they were still battling 145 blazes in Portugal – still recovering from its deadliest fire on record in June – and another 100 in Spain. Portugal’s government asked for international help and declared a state of emergency in territory north of the Tagus river – about half of its landmass.

“We are facing new conditions ... In an era of climate change, such disasters are becoming reality all over the world,” Portugal’s Interior Minister, Constanca Urbano de Sousa, said citing the fires burning in California.

About 520 separate fire outbreaks on Sunday were caused by “higher than average temperatures for the season and the cumulative effect of drought, which has been felt since the start of the year,” civil protection agency spokeswoman Patricia Gaspar said.

“We went through absolute hell, it was horrible. There was fire everywhere,” a resident of the town of Penacova told RTP TV.

Two brothers in their 40s who were from her town and were trying to help put out the blaze were among the dead.

In the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, on the Portuguese border, authorities were blaming arson for about 17 fires which have caused three deaths.

“They are absolutely intentional fires, premeditated, caused by people who know what they are doing,” said Alberto Nunez Feijoo, the head of the Galicia regional government.

On Monday, the “situation remained very worrying”, Feijoo said, adding that firefighters along with soldiers and locals were battling the flames.

Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said in a tweet that “several people have been identified in connection to the fires in Galicia.”

The fires were being fanned by wind gusts of up to 90 kilometers per hour as Hurricane Ophelia moved north off the coast of Spain towards Ireland, Zoido told private broadcaster La Sexta.

“We have not had a situation like this in the past decade. We have never deployed so many means at this time of the year,” he said.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who is from Galicia, expressed his condolences to the victims in a Twitter message.