Leaping into water tanks to escape Portugal’s deadly fires

Portugal is observing three days of national mourning after the deaths Saturday night around the town of Pedrogao Grande, 150 kilometres (90 miles) north of Lisbon.

Scorching weather, as well as strong winds and woods that are bone dry after weeks with little rain, fueled the blazes. Villages dot the landscape, much of it now scorched.

In Nodeirinho, a hillside village of a few dozen people, 84-year-old Marta da Conceicao said residents called the fire services more than 20 times for help on Saturday.

“Nobody came. They were up in the mountain or somewhere else,” she told The Associated Press. “Here it was up to God and the people.”

As the flames licked at her, burning her leg, she and her elderly neighbours survived by jumping into a water storage tank.

A British man living nearby also had a hair-raising escape. Like more than half of the dead in Saturday’s blaze, Daniel Starling had jumped in his car and raced away as the flames bore down. He came across a family of four elderly people and picked them up. He said he drove around fallen trees and even off the road in his quest to reach safety.

“We stopped at one point, because we did not know where to go, because there were flames everywhere. But I just carried on the only way that I knew. (It was) just flames over the car and the family and me screaming,” said the 56-year-old from Norwich, England.

They stopped when they came to a policeman at a junction. “The family,” Starling said, “got out and they were kissing the car.”

Officials say 47 of the dead in Saturday night’s blaze died on a road as they fled the flames.

Fire experts, meanwhile, pointed to a series of shortcomings in Portugal’s strategy of tackling wildfires, even though the summer blazes have been happening for decades. There is a broad consensus that more work is needed on fire prevention, starting with forest clearing and the creation of fire breaks.

“In Portugal, the main factor in the scale of wildfires is the unbroken stretches of forest,” Paulo Fernandes, a forest researcher at Portugal’s Tras-os-Montes e Alto Douro University, told the AP.

But he noted that around 90 per cent of landowners have smallholdings, making it difficult for authorities to keep tabs on them all.

Xavier Viegas, a wildfire expert at Portugal’s Coimbra University, said Portugal needs a long-term strategy, but changes in government often mean changes in forest and farm policies.

He said a key measure would be the creation of “fire-resilient communities” who receive instructions on what to do when faced with a wildfire and don’t act rashly.

“We need to prepare them so that they don’t go dashing off in cars,” Viegas told the AP.

Portugal’s leading environmental lobby group, Quercus, blamed the blazes on “forest management errors and bad political decisions” by governments over recent decades. It rebuked authorities for allowing the planting of huge swathes of eucalyptus trees — the country’s most common and most profitable species — but one that’s often blamed for stoking blazes.

Emergency services have also been criticized for not closing the road where most of the deaths occurred.

Wildfires are an annual scourge in Portugal. Between 1993 and 2013, Portugal recorded the highest annual number of forest fires in southern Europe, according to a report last year by the European Environment Agency.

The government announced a raft of new measures against wildfires in March. They included restrictions on eucalyptus plantations and a simplified and cheaper program of property registration that seeks to ascertain which land is being neglected.

Not all of those reforms have come into force yet.

Statistics show that 35 per cent of Portugal is covered by woodland, slightly above the EU average of 31 per cent. The forest industry, especially the production of paper pulp, accounts for around 3 per cent of the country’s GDP.

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Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal.

Barry Hatton And Helena Alves, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Leaping into water tanks to escape Portugal’s deadly fires

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