A forest fire in central Portugal devastated an area of 7,000 hectares and still has more than a thousand firefighters in action this Sunday, Civil Protection reported as the country experiences strong heat.
“It is estimated that the burned area is 7,000 hectares, but the potential of this fire could reach more than 20,000 hectares,” said José Guilherme, commander of the rescue services in charge of the operations.
“The more than a thousand operational troops that will remain on the ground are currently trying to guarantee the stabilization of the fire, whose perimeter already reaches 60 kilometers,” said the commander during a press conference in the municipality of Proença-a-Nova.
He added that “it’s a very large area with many houses and isolated towns” and that firefighters were focusing their efforts on four hot spots from which the flames were likely to ignite again.
This forest fire, which broke out on Friday in the town of Castelo Branco, devastated some 6,000 hectares in the first 24 hours, Civil Protection indicated in a first estimate of the burned area.
The smoke and ash that emanated reached the sanctuary city of Fatima on Saturday. Another outbreak mobilized more than 300 firefighters in Odemira, near the country’s southwest coast, on Sunday.
“The flames are giving way to the means of combat,” said Tiago Bugio, one of those responsible for Civil Protection, this Sunday morning, and specified that two fronts of the fire remained active, but that a third, which was heading towards the south and the touristy Algarve region, had been brought under control.
Due to the temperatures that on Sunday could reach 40ºC in some regions, civil protection warned on Saturday that the risk of fire would be “very high or maximum throughout the territory” during the “next days”.
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