A fire killed one person in the region of Aveiro, in the north of Portugal. The emergency services have been strongly mobilized for several days in the center of the country due to the forest fires linked to the heat wave. Fires are also raging in Gironde.
“Firefighters found a charred victim in the middle of the burnt area” in a fire that occurred overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday in the municipality of Murtosa, said Commander José Miranda, of the National Civil Protection Authority, without further clarification. According to the newspaper Correio da Manha, it was a woman in her fifties.
The fire, which reportedly broke out in a cornfield, has since been brought under control. It is however the center of the country which was the most affected by the forest fires which hit Portugal since last Thursday and which ignited once more on Tuesday followingnoon, fanned by the heat and the force of the wind.
Wednesday morning, four major outbreaks mobilized more than 1,500 firefighters in the municipalities of Leiria, Pombal and Ourém, located at the confluence of the districts of Leiria and Santarém, just over a hundred kilometers from Lisbon. The day before, several villages had to be evacuated as well as some 300 people who were in the town of Freixianda, in the commune of Ourém.
Thirty injured
Interrupted until dawn, traffic had meanwhile resumed on several roads, including the A1 motorway which connects Lisbon to northern Portugal. Since Thursday, the emergency services have identified around thirty minor injuries and at least a dozen damaged houses, according to a provisional report provided by civil protection.
In a country that remains traumatized by the deadly fires of 2017, which killed more than 100 people, the government has decided to reinforce the mobilization of the emergency services and to increase their powers, by decreeing a ‘state of contingency’ in less until Friday.
On Wednesday, the Portuguese Meteorological Institute placed 16 of the 18 districts of the mainland under red alert, double the number the day before. Temperatures are expected to exceed 40°C in much of the country, and rise to 46°C in the Santarém region.
In France also
The fires are also wreaking havoc in France. Two fires which had started Tuesday followingnoon in Gironde, in Landiras and near the dune of Pilat, leading to thousands of evacuations, had ravaged 1,200 hectares of pines on Wednesday morning, according to a latest report from the prefecture of Gironde.
In total, 445 hectares were burned in Teste-de-Buch, near the Dune du Pilat, and 800 hectares in Landiras, regarding 40 km south of Bordeaux, according to a press release.
The fire which led to the evacuation of 6,000 people living in five campsites in the very touristic area of Pilat, was “not fixed” Wednesday morning, said commander Laurent Dellac, of Codis Gironde, who evokes an “operational configuration hard’.
The Southwest is facing a heatwave episode which is raging for the second time in a month in France and for which seven departments are placed on heatwave orange vigilance.
/ATS