As the monster fire nears enters its sixth day, the municipalities of Monchique, Silves and Portimão have been affected, with vehicles, houses and farms destroyed along with 21,000 hectares of forest and farmland.
With an enormous pall of smoke darkening the sky this afternoon and columns of black smoke being pushed skyward by the intense heat, there is little doubt in anyone’s mind that the fire is out of control as it makes its way from Silves to Messines.
Rui André, the Monchique mayor who has led from the front throughout the current devastating fire, said that the municipality has been abandoned by government.
André attributed poor forest management as the cause for the prolongation of the fire that has been running for five days and has devastated an important area of the Monchique economy.
The Secretary of State for Infrastructures, Guilherme d'Oliveira Martins, firmly has rejected claims that the national railway company Comboios de Portugal (CP) is "in a state of collapse."
"The opposition PSD / CDS-PP is creating a case that does not exist at all. There is no collapse whatsoever, what happens are options on the part of the CP to ensure that there are decent transport conditions and quality," rambled Martins.
Eurostat has published the electricity and gas prices comparisons for consumers in EU countries, showing Portugal as the third most expensive despite low wages and high tax rates.
Portugal is behind Belgium and Denmark for the high prices its consumers pay for electricity with half the cost shown on invoiced being for various additional fees and top-rate VAT. Portuguese consumers also pay the third highest price for gas supplies.
More than 400 people died of natural causes on Sunday, August 5th. The death rate was directly related to the high temperatures across Portugal.
The age group with the highest mortality was the over-75s, representing 324 of the 401 deaths recorded.
The lunchtime update on the Mochique fire revealed that mobile phone coverage was out across several key areas in the hills, electricity has been cut off, either due to damaged lines or at the request of Civil Defence to avoid injury to people from fallen power lines.
There are 40 kilometres of damaged EDP power lines and 17 locations without any power.
Firefighters are faced with multiple re-ignitions of the Monchique blaze that at lunchtime was reported as 95% under control, click HERE
Early this evening the fire again threatened the outskirts of Monchique with more houses set alight.
A 28-year-old British man, said to be suffering from manic depression, has cut his mother’s throat at the luxury villa in Caramujeira, Lagoa, where they both had lived for 18 years.
Neighbours were alerted by the man’s strange behaviour, went to the villa and found the woman dead, lying on the terrace.
