Bad weather: Sixteen roads remain closed by complex works

Miguel Pinto Luz was heard today in the parliament in Lisbon by the Eventual Commission for National Resilience, Prevention of Natural Disasters and Monitoring Portugal Transformation, Recovery and Resilience (PTRR).

The minister pointed out that, following the storms, there were 3,444 occurrences in the national road network, “whereof 336 corresponded to total road cuts”.

“Today, 16 remain closed and four were opened with conditioning. These are very complex interventions, with difficult accesses, which require surveys of the terrain, studies, projects and even expropriations. [...] These are works that require the construction of new parts and not simple recoveries. In many of these situations it is simply impossible for the road to go back through its previous location”, he said.

According to the ruler, also on the railroad “the impact was very great, with 681 occurrences”. The Beira Baixa Line should finally open on September 20th and the West Line should open phased by sections, but in full only at the beginning of next year.

The government has indicated that these interventions require a “very high financial effort”, with a reinforcement of EUR 400 million (ME) for Portugal’s Infrastructures (IP), which add up to the 90 ME that was IP’s own budget.

Of this amount, 221 million have already been hired for the roads and 78 million for the railway, the remaining value being “contracted in the coming months”, to be “100% executed”.

With regard to telecommunications, the impact of the storms “had unprecedented damage,” said Pinto Luz, stressing that, according to ANACOM, “On February 1, there were 77,792 users without access to the fixed network, and only 15 days later 65% of these breaks had been recovered.”.

“ Currently, two of the three operators have already reached normal service levels while the third, MEO, had on September 1, a record of 323 failures. That is, more than 99% of the occurrences were resolved,” added the Secretary of State for Infrastructure, Hugo Espírito Santo.

The minister pointed out that “there are still some 16 thousand poles to be replaced and miles of cables to the ground, a process that is far from complete, even though the provision of the services supported in these infrastructures is already almost fully restored”.

“ It is estimated that the permanent replacement of damaged physical infrastructure will only be completed in the first half of 2027”, he added.

As for the mobile network, 281,134 users were left without access to networks: On February 15, “75 percent of accesses had already been restored and by April the situation was already normalized”.

According to the Secretary of State for Housing, Patrícia Gonçalves Costa, there were 35,908 applications for house recovery, of which 82% are analyzed and 93% of these are paid, in a total of “more than 80 million paid to families”.

32% of the cases analyzed were rejected because they were not the first dwelling, the ownership of the property was not discovered, or the insurance values were higher than the public support they would have.

In the insurance sector, there were 179,000 applications and 81% of them were paid, he added.