Today, Monday, the Civil Protection announced that two people were killed in the fires that broke out in Portugal in the Vila Real region (north).
“It’s a road accident, the car left the road in the Morsa fire area,” Portuguese Civil Protection Commander Andre Fernandez declared at one point.
“We found the car of these two people, about 70 years old, completely charred, and the couple died inside their car,” the mayor of Murcia, Mario Artur Lopez, explained to SIC Noticias TV.
“They were in their home in the village of Benabis and decided to flee when the fire approached their house,” he added.
Listen to Stéphane Gendron on mic by Vincent Dessureault on QUB Radio:
Despite favorable weather conditions in recent days, including freezing temperatures, more than 1,000 firefighters were still on the move Monday evening to combat six major outbreaks in northern Portugal.
A water-bombed aircraft fighting forest fires crashed, Friday, near Vila Nova de Foz Cua, in the Guarda (North) region, killing the pilot, its only occupant.
Portugal has been hit by a series of fires since July 8, coinciding with the arrival of a severe heat wave that has already devoured tens of thousands of hectares of vegetation.
Since the beginning of 2022, fires have destroyed nearly 44,000 hectares of forest in Portugal, according to provisional data published Monday by the Institute for Nature and Forest Conservation (ICNF).
According to the ICNF, the area burned this year is the largest since 2017, a year marked by deadly fires that killed nearly 100 people.
