“All the situations that were still active at dawn yesterday and today have been mastered,” national civil defense commander André Fernandes told a press conference.
If falling temperatures and rainfall helped put out the fires, he warned that more heavy rainfall in the coming days could lead to landslides in fire-affected areas.
Thousands of fires broke out
Since Saturday, firefighters have had to deal with more than a thousand fires, fanned by the stifling heat and high winds hitting the Iberian country.
According to an estimate provided on Thursday by the European Copernicus Observatory, dozens of these fires were ignited, especially in the Aveiro region (in the north), where four outbreaks reached a circumference of about a hundred kilometers and destroyed about 20,000 hectares of vegetation.
According to data from the National Institute for Nature Conservation and Forestry (ICNF), the area burned by fires across the country since the beginning of the year is now more than 120,000 hectares, of which 60% is forest, 29% is scrubland and 11% is agricultural land. ).
The majority of this damage was caused by this week’s fires, with the area burned barely exceeding 10,000 hectares by the end of August.
5 deaths
The loss in 2024 is therefore the heaviest since dark 2017, when the burned area reached 500,000 hectares. The fires in June and October 2017 also caused more than a hundred deaths.
Five people, including four firefighters, died in this week’s fires and nearly a hundred people were injured, 14 of them seriously, according to a report Friday.
The government declared a day of national mourning on Friday and thanked France, Spain, Italy and Morocco, which sent around ten water bomber planes as reinforcements.
