LISBON: The fires raging throughout Portugal claimed their first sufferer Friday (Aug 15), when the previous mayor of the jap city of Guarda died preventing fires there, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa introduced.
The president supplied “heartfelt condolences to the mayor of Guarda for the dying of former mayor Carlos Damaso, sufferer of a hearth he was preventing in his parish, asking that he cross them on to his household”, mentioned the president’s assertion.
Rebelo de Sousa added that he had reduce quick his holidays and returned to the presidential palace, becoming a member of a gathering of the Nationwide Emergency and Civil Safety Authority.
For a number of days now, a number of thousand firefighters have been battling fires in varied elements of the nation.
Like its neighbour Spain, Portugal has invoked the EU’s civil safety mechanism to ask for assist, requesting 4 firefighting plane to make use of till Monday, the presidency mentioned on X.
After devastating fires in 2017 that killed 119 folks throughout the nation, Portugal boosted funding on hearth prevention tenfold, doubling its funds for preventing forest fires.
It subsequently managed to scale back the quantity of land misplaced to 54,000 hectares (134,000 acres) between 2018 and 2023, a 3rd of what was misplaced between 2001 and 2017, in response to authorities figures.
