Portugal making progress on fatal fires

Water-dropping plane crash reports not true

LISBON, Portugal — Emergency services in Portugal said Tuesday they were making good progress in controlling a major wildfire that killed 64 people in the central area of the country, while officials said reports that a water-dropping plane had crashed in the area of the blaze turned out to be false.

Mariajoseandreofportugal’sair Accident Office said her department was told by the Civil Protection Agency that a Canadair water-dropping plane had crashed on Tuesday while fighting the wildfire. Her office immediately sent a crash investigation team to the area.

But in a bizarre sequence of events, officials with the Portuguese government and the Civil Protection Agency said they could not confirm acrashhadtakenplace.theysaid airborne search-and-rescue teams dispatched to look for wreckage didn’t find anything and that no firefighting planes were missing.

Civil Protection Agency spokesman Fausto Coutinho suggested that word of a plane crash was based on misleading information relayed from the fire area. He could not explain why Portugal’s Air Accident Office said it received a call from the agency notifying it of a plane crash, but said the confusing situation on the ground could have misled people.

“It could have been a strange coincidence, with a plane passing over and an explosion occurring on the ground at the same time,” Coutinho toldtheap.

Vitor Vaz Pinto, another Civil Protection Agency spokesman, said an abandoned caravan containing gas bottles had exploded in the same areaandsentupafireball,suggesting that may have led people to think there was a crash.

The Civil Protection Agency said about 2,400 firefighters and 24 water-dropping aircraft were fighting the deadly wildfire.

Armando Franca The Associated Press A firefighting airplane drops a load of water Tuesday in an effort to prevent a forest fire from reaching the village of Ouzenda, outside Pedrogao Grande in central Portugal.