In Portugal we have a lot of dry thunderstorms: there are no thunderstorms without having humidity and clouds that will cause them, what happens is that the water does not reach down here.

But the great number of ignitions are those that result from human activity, mainly activity that has to do with agricultural practices or that have to do with bonfires or accidents with machinery.

They are thin and dry fuels, such as grass and leaves, because the behaviour of the fire will depend a lot on the humidity that the plants have, and it is these smaller, thinner ones that dry more easily.

So, we’ve already seen that, to burn, the behaviour of fire will depend on the vegetation and the weather, because the weather will affect the vegetation.

This will mean that:

If we are going to burn, we are going to make a bonfire or we are going to make an extensive burn, one of the first steps we must take is:

• Go to the IPMA website to see if we have conditions to burn.

If we’re up to high fire risk, we can burn. But we always must ask for authorization, either at the city council, or go to the “queimas e queimadas” website and ask for authorization to burn on the specific day and knowing if we have the ideal conditions to make this fire.

On the IPMA website we can find out what the humidity, temperature and wind are.

To burn we must have ideal conditions, so that the fire does not escape. In this case we will have:

• the humidity must be between 30% and 70%. If it’s more than 70%, it probably won’t burn, if it’s less than 30% it could burn very easily and very intensely and we don’t want that.
• The wind must be less than 15 km/h, which is the moderate wind, if it is too strong, the flame may jump and may cause a wildfire.
• And the temperature, more than 25ºC, it’s already summer, we don’t want to burn in summer. And therefore, we must have a temperature between 0 and 20 degrees.

If we have the weather wheel all green, we can safely burn.

The fire is yours, the responsibility is yours.