“Last year I didn’t wear a vest even once”: Mayor of Sardol on the “Safe Village, Safe People” project

The mayor, elected by the SDP and serving his final term, admits he cannot say that the unprecedented fact was due to fuel management gangs, but believes they helped.

“No fire starts big, they all start very small,” he recalled in an interview with Lusa near a cactus plantation once occupied by eucalyptus and pine trees that now serve as a fire break.

“If we manage to put out the fire in the first 15 minutes, it is a success, since then the fire often goes out only when it wants to, and for these 15 minutes to exist, the ground must be clean, there must be these tracks, so the spread is not fast,” he emphasizes.

At first, Miguel Borges was very critical of the “Aldeia Segura Pessoa Seguras” program, created in 2018 and to which 38 of the 40 communities in the municipality of Sardol have already joined (the other two have not done so due to their size and characteristics).

“I continue to be [crítico]but in a more moderate form, because the work is being done. Indeed, […] Until 2017, we didn’t know what we wanted to do with our forest, we all made mistakes,” he says.

“It took a tragedy” – the Pedrogão Grande fires that killed 66 people, injured more than 250 and destroyed 500 homes and 50 businesses – to convince everyone that “something had to change,” he admits.

In this context, the mayor cannot understand how there are municipal councils that have not yet joined Safe People of the Village, claiming that membership is becoming “mandatory”.

In its 2023 report, the Agency for Integrated Rural Fire Management (AGIF) said adhesion levels were “significantly below” expectations.

Last year saw the smallest increase since the program began, with only 12 villages joining, for a total of 2,242 villages, of which less than half have fire evacuation plans.

In a recent interview with Lusa, André Fernández, commander of the National Emergency and Civil Protection Service, admitted that the program is not progressing at the desired speed, given the goal of reaching 7,000 clusters by 2030.

At the same time, “registration is not done everywhere, there are people who have land, but they don’t know that they own land,” emphasizes Miguel Borges.

One of the challenges now is to convince the owners to hand over land management to AGIF.

“They will always remain the owners, they will hand over the management of this space to an organization that will carry out the treatment,” the mayor explains, acknowledging that “these things do not change by decree from one day to the next.”

Although this is not happening, another step is being taken in the municipality of Sardoal: membership in the Condomínio de Aldeia is being implemented, a complementary program aimed at villages located in vulnerable forest areas, which involves the creation of a 100-meter fuel management strip around a population center (or 50 meters around scattered houses) and which finances the replacement of forest land with agricultural land.

In the municipality, 36 villages from three parishes with a population of over two thousand people will join the program, and the investment will amount to over one million euros. One part is already implementing the program, the second has already received approval, and the third is awaiting approval of the application.

The operation is already visible, as it is necessary to “uproot some stumps and prepare the soil” for the next planting season, which will begin in October, explains Nuno Morgado, commander of the municipal firefighters and municipal civil protection coordinator in the municipality of Sardoal.

“We can never say we’re fully prepared,” the commander admits, stressing that the programs, created to respond to rural fires, extend to “all hazards,” from earthquakes to extreme weather events.