VOUZELA: At least 31 people have died in fires ravaging forests in northern and central Portugal over the past 24 hours, rescuers said Monday afternoon, after three people were killed in Spain in blazes sparked by arsonists and fanned by Hurricane Ophelia.

In Portugal, Prime Minister Antonio Costa declared a state of emergency as some 5,000 firefighters fought some 30 major fires.

The 31 deaths, confirmed by Portugal’s national civil protection agency, come four months after 64 people were killed and more than 250 injured on June 17, in the deadliest fire in the country’s history.

Even before the latest blazes, nearly 530,000 acres had been consumed by wildfires across the country between January and September, according to estimates from the country’s forest service.

The 524 registered outbreaks of fire, by far the most since 2006, were caused by “higher than average temperatures for the season and the cumulative effect of drought”, civil protection agency spokeswoman Patricia Gaspar told AFP.

She said 51 people have been wounded in the fires, 15 seriously.

One of the worst-hit areas is near Lousa, in the Coimbra region, where 650 firefighters are battling blazes.

“We went through absolute hell, it was horrible. There was fire everywhere,” a resident of the town of Penacova told RTP television.

Two brothers in their 40s who were trying to put out the blaze there were among the fatalities.

In a village in the commune of Vouzela, in the northern district of Viseu, residents used water hoses to try to fight the flames as several homes were consumed, an AFP reporter saw.

Fallen electricity pylons and abandoned cars were left lying in roads, the area surrounded by burnt pine and eucalyptus trees, as thick smoke clogged the sky.

“Most of the victims were killed in their cars, but we also found them inside their houses,” said the mayor of the town of Oliveira do Hospital, Jose Carlos Alexandrino, on public television RTP.

“The whole city looked like a ball of fire, surrounded by flames on all sides,” he said.

Published in Dawn, October 17th, 2017