Portugal, repeatedly, has been deeply flagged by forest fires. In June and October 2017, two major occurrences lead to more than 120 deaths and surpassed 250000 hectares of burned forest.
This research goal aims to reflect and draw lessons from the experience, in order to find new ways of reassuring communities’ safety, rebuild trust and responsibility and empowerment over their own lives.
Assuming that it is possible to draw learning lessons from the analysis of disaster case studies, we analyzed published literature, official reports, media, interviews to local inhabitants, experts, government officials, civil protection agents, directly and/or indirectly involved on the two major forest fires.
This work focus on the role played by citizens and decision makers, their level of responsibility and which effectively assumed.
Results point to a general inability to deal with forest fires with unusual proportions. The constellation of occurrences created a complex situation overburden by the need of multiple simultaneously responses over different geographic areas.
Findings reveal lack of preparation from local communities, lack of response from local authorities, fragility of leadership. It was evident the unsuitability to manage the catastrophe from the various authority levels. Risk communication was late, inadequate, contradictory, unclear. The governance model exposed failure of decision making – plus a collective emotional blockage seems to have emerged due to an unusual amount of death casualties -, resulting in insecure and outraged citizens.
The study shows that there is a space opportunity for change and claim that the country should make the most of it.
The study allows to conclude the need to reformulate the existing model of governance to respond to new unusual occurrences, adjusting the roles of decision makers and citizens.
For that, fluxes of top down, bottom-up, horizontal levels of communication should be rethought. This would allow to respond to a strong need to change political mindset, citizen awareness, open the academia to the society, in order to build empowered and resilient communities based primarily on knowledge and trust.
Doing this, the country is answering to the urgency to create a new model of governance.