"In the next decade, without a sustainable and long-term intervention, there is a growing risk of an extreme year of fires consuming 500,000 hectares or more," such as the fires of 2017, which killed more than 100 people."This is what you have to think about and that is what you have to plan for," warned US fire specialist, Mark Beighley, adding, "There is no time to lose."
The risk of catastrophic fires the same or worse than those of 2017, is real and has a tendency to increase, warned US experts as they presented a report at the Instituto Superior de Agronomia in Lisbon.
"Without serious and immediate intervention, Portugal can expect a worse situation than in 2017. Up to 750,000 hectares can burn. Firefighting provision would collapse. Only a massive international intervention can contain the flames."
Mark Beighley, the wildland fire consultant and owner of Beighley Consulting LLC, concluded, "the Portuguese are the problem and so may be the solution," as the number of fires per million inhabitants is absurd: 1,488, that is, six times more than in Spain (which is in second place), despite Spain being five times bigger and having four times the population.
Carelessness and neglect join, "an ocean of flammable fuel" and climate change that tends to aggravate heat and drought, said Beghley, who added that in Portugal, "nothing substantial has changed."
As for increased air support, “this may help in a normal year, but it did not solve the problem."
The proposed solutions put forward by the US team include professionally trained, younger, better paid and attractive careers "for a profession that is physically demanding and is most needed in the interior of the country where the population is aging."
Land owners need "financial incentives" to collaborate on prevention and there is a need to increase the number of sapper teams with machines to create and maintain firebreaks, added the experts.
The forest landscape must be "a mosaic of different species and trees of different ages, which helps to slow down the progression of fires.”
Beighley acknowledged that he was outlining a worst case scenario and that this was scary, but “people need to be scared to the point of changing their behaviour."