Portugal faces first fatality as wildfires rage across Southern Europe amid heatwave

Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a -  

MADRID, Aug 16 — Portugal suffered its first death yesterday from the fires raging there, as Spain’s weather agency warned of a “very high to extreme risk” of more wildfires there during Europe’s intense heatwave.

Further east, Greece was still fighting blazes on one Aegean island, but the situation had improved for several other southern European countries.

Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa announced the death of the former mayor of the eastern town of Guarda, Carlos Damaso, who had been fighting the fires.

The president said he had cut short his holidays and returned to work, joining a meeting of the National Emergency and Civil Protection Authority.

For days now, several thousand firefighters have been battling fires in various parts of the country.

Portugal, like Spain, has invoked the EU’s civil protection mechanism to ask for help, requesting four firefighting aircraft to use until Monday, its presidency said on X.

In Spain, three people have died in the fires, including two young volunteers in their thirties who lost their lives trying to extinguish a blaze in the Castile and Leon area.

One of them, Jaime Aparicio Vidales, was buried in the town of Quintanilla de Florez, Zamora province, Castile and Leon, yesterday.

Much of the country has already endured nearly two weeks of high temperatures, and yesterday the searing heat spread to Cantabria, which had so far been spared.

Temperatures in the northwestern region were forecast to pass 40C, said Aemet, the national weather agency.

The risk of fires yesterday and over the weekend through to Monday was “very high or extreme in most of the country”, it added.

 ‘Nothing left to burn’ 

Spain has endured a devastating wildfire season, with 157,501 hectares (389,193 acres) reduced to ashes since the start of the year, according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

Yet that figure is still short of 2022, when more than 306,000 hectares went up in smoke.

On Thursday, France sent two water-bombing planes to help try to douse the flames in the northwestern region, where a dozen fires were still raging.

The railway line between Madrid and the northwestern region of Galicia remained closed, as well as 10 main roads.

Marco Raton, 35, works on a pig farm in Sesnandez de Tabara near one of the fires in Castile and Leon that forced several thousand people to flee their homes.

He and his friends did not think twice when they saw the fire arrive on Tuesday, he said.

They grabbed “everything we had—backpacks, fire bats and garden hoses—put on appropriate clothing and went over to help”, he added.

“As soon as we arrived, we started seeing burned people being evacuated, a car on fire, a burning tractor, warehouses, garages,” he told AFP.

He felt “helpless”, he added.

Raton had thought there was “nothing left to burn” after devastating fires in the same region in 2022. Now he was convinced that “this will continue to happen to us year after year”.

The mayor of Ferreruela, Angel Roman, called for fire breaks of cleared brush to be established around the villages. “The countryside, if it’s clean, can stop the fire,” he said.

France on red alert 

Meteorologists in France, meanwhile, put the southern department of Aude—where a devastating fire has already killed one person and injured several others—on red alert.

The fire, which broke out on August 5, has still not been fully extinguished and temperatures are expected to reach 40C there on Saturday.

“We are in a situation of extreme vigilance,” said Lucie Roesch, general secretary of the local prefecture.

Further east, lower temperatures and reduced winds were helping to improve the situation in Greece and the Balkans, where rain was forecast in many parts of the region.

Firefighters remained in Patras, Greece’s third-largest city, monitoring scattered outbreaks.

The most active blaze was still on the Mediterranean island of Chios, in the northeastern Aegean Sea, where eight aircraft have been deployed to try to douse the flames.

The risk of fire remained high in the Attica region that includes the capital, Athens, and the southern Peloponnese peninsula, the Civil Protection agency warned yesterday.

In Albania, initial government estimates said thousands of cattle had been killed and 40 homes destroyed in just three days of wildfires. — AFP