“I believe the choice was well made. The choice was, as it happened in 2017, to try to both combat [the fire] and reduce the burned area while looking after people and communities, and it failed because the burned area was smaller than this year, but the number of victims was brutally higher,” stated Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on the sidelines of a visit to the Lisbon Book Fair, which opened today.
Accompanied by the Mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira, the head of state recalled that since the 2017 fires, which caused dozens of deaths and left a trail of destruction in the central region, the firefighting strategy has changed, and in his opinion, for the better.
“From then on [2017 fires] the strategy changed and it is now primarily to try to protect human lives, first to protect the communities, even if this leads to a larger burned area,” he indicated.
And he questioned: “What would those who have to make this decision in the command of such an operation do? I think they would do exactly the same, that is, they would save human lives.”
