Portugal fire survivors recount confusion
Crews were still struggling Monday to tame the deadly blaze, which killed at least 64 and injured 135
CNODEIRINHO, Portugal onstantino Gracieta and his wife were among the lucky ones. At first, they got in their car and tried to escape the advancing flames that swept across a vast, dry forest in central Portugal over the weekend.
But finding the road that cuts through their hamlet, Mosteiro, engulfed by fire, they turned back and began to hose down their house instead.
“People fought to save their houses,” Gracieta said. “I knew that, with the road completely cut and the whole forest on fire, firefighters were never going to get here quick enough to help us.”
At least 64 people were not as fortunate, perishing in the wildfire, many of them while in their cars trying to flee. With 135 people injured, the authorities warned that the death toll could still rise from the fire, which started Saturday, apparently ignited by lightning strikes.
Already, the fatalities have made the wildfire the worst in half a century in a small country where deadly blazes have become increasingly severe and routine, as long-standing land management problems collide with changes in climate that produce hotter, drier summers.
On Monday, crews were still struggling to tame the deadly blaze in central Portugal, even as more than 2,000 firefighters battled separate fires around the country amid strong winds and scorching temperatures.
Given those circumstances and the country’s history, some were already beginning to question why Portugal had not done more sooner to improve its land practices and fire-warning systems, and whether the authorities did enough to inform people trying to escape the blaze.
“I understand that it’s very hard to control such a fire, but I don’t understand why it’s so hard to coordinate the movement of people,” said Aires Henriques, who ended up driving for several hours along back roads to circumvent the fire area.
He and his wife, Maria Lourdes, were driving home on Saturday afternoon to their village of Troviscais from Porto when a friend called to warn them about the blaze. The police stopped them on IC8, the road that crosses this area, and told them to take another route, without specifying which one.
While he knows the area well, he said, “We’ve got tourists and others who probably had no idea where they were going.”
For now, an atmosphere of national tragedy and mourning stifled much of the impulse for finger-pointing. Portugal’s political parties for the most part heeded a call by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to first deal with the emergency before discussing its circumstances.
“Now is the time for the authorities to act, not the time for politicians,” Pedro Passos Coelho, leader of the main center-right opposition party, said over the weekend. Once the flames have been extinguished, however, there will no doubt be an investigation into why so many victims apparently died after finding themselves cut off, encircled by fire and stranded along roads they took while trying to flee by car.
Around the Pedrógão Grande area, several residents said they were largely left to their own devices in terms of working out whether to drive off — and where to.
As roads got cut off, firefighters, too, struggled to reach isolated hamlets. In Mosteiro, for instance, residents said firefighters — who had traveled from the city of Porto de Mós, about an hour’s drive away — arrived long after the fire had already crossed the hamlet.
Around the town of Pedrógão Grande, firefighters were trying to put out the last pockets of fire Monday, with the support of firefighting planes, amid fears that the dry weather conditions could easily rekindle the flames.
Maintenance workers were removing fallen road signs, as well as electricity and phone lines dangling across secondary roads. Volunteers and charity workers were crisscrossing the region in minivans, delivering water and food to the residents who survived the weekend inferno.
At a gas station, a group of firefighters sat next to their vehicles, visibly exhausted. “This is just a very, very, very big tragedy,” one of them said.
While climate change may help explain the severity and speed of the weekend blaze, environmentalists also said it reflected long-standing forest management issues.
A significant problem, some environmentalists said, has been the proliferation of the planting of eucalyptus trees for profit, to be farmed for paper pulp. Eucalyptus offers a far quicker return on investment after its plantation than pine and many other kinds of wood. But it also contains flammable oil.
The surface area covered by eucalyptus trees has more than doubled in Portugal since the 1980s. Eucalyptus is now the most grown tree in the country, covering about 26 percent of forested land, ahead of cork oak, whose exports have long formed a pillar of Portugal’s economy. Some environmentalists said the fire showed the need for a cap.