2023-08-06 13:34:59
A forest fire in central Portugal ravaged an area of some 7,000 hectares and still mobilized, this Sunday, more than a thousand firefighters.
A fire in central Portugal has ravaged thousands of hectares of forest and still mobilized, this Sunday, more thana thousand firefighters, said civil protection while the Iberian country was experiencing strong heat. Firefighters focused their efforts on four hotspots from which the flames were likely to start again.
The estimated burned area is 7,000 hectaresbut the potential of this fire is estimated at more than 20,000 hectares”, declared the commander of the rescue services in charge of operations, José Guilherme.
“It’s a very large area with a lot of isolated houses and villages.”
“The more than a thousand operational personnel that will remain on the ground are at this stage trying to guarantee the stabilization of the fire, whose perimeter has already reached 60 km“, he said during a press briefing in Proença-a-Nova. “It is a very large area with many isolated dwellings and villages,” he added.
Close to the Pope’s place of visit
This forest fire, which broke out on Friday in the town of Castelo Branco, destroyed some 6,000 hectares in the first 24 hours, civil protection had indicated in a first estimate of the burned area. Smoke and ash from it on Saturday reached the shrine city of Fatima (central Portugal) even though Pope Francis had gathered more than 200,000 pilgrims there.
Another outbreak mobilized more than 300 firefighters in Odemira, near the southwestern coast of the country, on Sunday. “The flames give way to the means of combat”, however indicated Sunday morning a person in charge of civil protection, Tiago Bugio, specifying that two fronts of the fire remained activebut that a third, which was heading south and the tourist region of the Algarve, had been subdued.
Due to temperatures that could reach 40°C in regions on Sunday, civil protection warned on Saturday that the risk of fire would be “very high or maximum throughout the territory” over the “coming days”. In neighboring Spain, a forest fire that burned nearly 600 hectares in Catalonia, on the border with France, remained under control on Sunday, despite a few recoveries thanks to strong winds, while Andalusian firefighters managed to control the flames in Bonares, Andalusia.
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