Portugal Safety and Security Report Wednesday 7th August 2023
By David Thomas
Good afternoon everyone, the last few days have been dominated by the rural fires ion the mainland in particular the Odemira fire which was active for five days and was brought under resolution earlier today.
This and many of the other fires were largely predictable given the high temperatures, maximum fire risk in many parts of the country and fire danger at “extreme” and above in certain areas. Civil protection pre-positioned many resources in high risk areas accordingly. I outlined this on KissFm radio of Sunday and I hopefully the advice helped people in preparing and dealing with such fires.
It is important, however, to note that in forest fires it is not the high temperatures that produces the fires. In general it is human activity, often by carelessness, sometimes intentionally. The fires are facilitated by the existence of these high temperatures, the low humidity of the air, which make the vegetation dry and is more likely for it to ignite, and spread. We have to be even more careful. Unfortunately, we see that this is not what happens. Often, people undertake activities that they think will not have any consequences and cause these fires.
Safe Communities Portugal monitored the Odemira fire from the start and we created a major incident page on our website. To make it easier to follow. It was apparent from the outset that this would be a difficult fire to suppress, due to many factors such and deep and enclosed valleys which are difficult to access on land by fire fighters and track machines, the variable weather with high temperatures and in particular gusty and variable wind conditions sometimes up to 80 km/h.
These challenges were described by ANEPC as; “an area of interest approaching 9,000 ha, characterized by extensive areas of pine forest, adult and young eucalyptus, cork oaks, strawberry trees and bushes and a scattered building and rural/urban interface zones that required a dispersion of combat means for actions to protect the populations and protected heritage. As a result of the steep slope with embedded valleys, along with the constant reactivations, these became quickly out of suppression capacity, aggravated by the lack of conditions conducive to progression with crawler machines in the consolidation process”.
Taking advantage of improved weather conditions overnight 8th/9th August the fire has been brought to a resolution today, but with increasing temperatures in the Algarve later today, with an orange level warning in place, some reactivations are inevitable.
Since the beginning of the year, more than 5,529 fire events have already affected 19,106 hectares of rural areas. Yesterday: there 153 and 170 on Monday.
The question also arose whether or not the government should declare a Situation of Alert to help deal with the outbreak of fires.
Secretary of State for Civil Protection announced this was being assessed on Sunday, taking into account the operational response to combat the fires and weather conditions. However, “as time progressed”, and based on a permanent daily assessment, “the situation began to change slightly” to a meteorological picture quite different from the one that we had initially in the middle of the afternoon of Sunday”. Therefore, it is necessary to understand that this is an instrument absolutely exceptional, as well as the declaration of the state of contingency.
Let us hope that we do not have to embark on these sort of measures as we did in 2022 during the heatwave, when there were more fires over a longer period.
The response to the creation of our new Facebook group, Safe Communities Portugal has exceeded expectations with close to 1700 members in just 40 days since it was formed. This group fills a vacuum as its aim is to increase risk awareness and preparedness, so everyone knows how to reduce the impact of major disasters where possible and action to take during such events. We have covered major fire events and will continue to do so during the months ahead. We ask people to monitor closely weather reports and in particular fire risks and dangers.
With that please have a safe week ahead.