Ricardo Graça / Lusa
There are more than 250 thousand hectares burned, still not counting this week’s fires. It is almost like the whole district of Lisbon had burned. The president of Civil Protection says that this year “we crashed us”.
The area burned in Portugal this year is the third largest since 2002. According to the Integrated Rural Fire Management System (Sgifr), since January 1, 250 thousand hectares of bush and forest (2500 km2).
This area is almost equivalent to almost the entire area of the Lisbon district (2761 km2) e higher than that of the Porto district (2395 km2).
Girding us to cities, it has already burned 25 times the area of the city of Lisbon (100 km2); and 62 cities of Porto (41 km2), without accounting for this week’s fires in the Vila Real and Bragança districts.
According to Sgifr data, cited by Correio da Manhã, of the 250,000 hectares accounted for, almost 178,000 burned in the center of the country, 91,000 in Beiras and Serra da Estrela, almost 69 thousand in the Coimbra region – especially.
No Nortealmost 623 thousand hectares were burned – this region that leads the number of fires, with More than half of the national total, 58.3%.
From January 1 and August 25, this year is the third with largest burned area, only behind 2005 (300,820 hectares) and 2003 (420,847 hectares).
This Thursday, in an interview with, José Manuel MouraPresident of the National Emergency and Civil Protection Authority (Anepc), said it is still early to take stock, but admits that there were a set of situations that, at the same time, contributed to this scenario: since the Meteorology, the incendays, through the lack of work on prevention and coordination in the fight against fire.
“It has been eight years since Pedrógão and everything was ready to burn. Until Pedrógão is worse than it was in 2017 [em termos de paisagem florestal]. But given the civic start, when the fire now arrived we managed to get 20 air asses and wage it. This year we fell to Fava“He acknowledged.
