Portugal Bought Emergency Radio Handsets for Every Parish After Storm Kristin. The Tender for the Generators Drew No Bidders at All.
The Minister of Economy and Territorial Cohesion told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that the generator tender will have to be run again, with no date attached. The satellite phones are waiting on a Court of Auditors approval.
When storm Kristin crossed central Portugal at the start of this year, it took power lines and mobile networks down with it, and a number of villages spent days unable to call anyone at all. The government's answer was to equip every junta de freguesia (parish council) in the country with three things: a SIRESP radio handset on the emergency services network, a satellite phone, and a generator.
Eight months later, one of those three has been bought. Manuel Castro Almeida, the Minister of Economy and Territorial Cohesion, told MPs on Tuesday that the tender for the generators attracted no bidders whatsoever and will have to be run again.
"We opened the tender and there were no candidates," he said. "Perhaps because there is no capacity to fill an order that large." He did not offer a new date.
What the hearing covered
The minister was appearing before the Assembleia da República's 13th committee, on State Reform and Local Government, for his scheduled regimental hearing, listed on the parliamentary record as audição 60-CREPL-XVII and held on 22 September.
On the SIRESP handsets he was more positive: they have been purchased and will be distributed to parish councils shortly. The satellite phones sit in between. That tender is complete and is with the Tribunal de Contas (Court of Auditors) awaiting its visto, the prior approval Portuguese public contracts above a threshold must obtain before money moves.
"If the Court of Auditors' visto arrives on time, we will be in a position to have Starlink available by 31 December," Castro Almeida said, putting the timing outside his own hands.
The programme is funded through the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (Recovery and Resilience Plan), using money freed by the reprogramming that dropped projects which could no longer be finished on schedule because of the storms. The aim was that every parish council should end up with a generator, mobile communications and a wi-fi point, so that it can at least tell residents what is happening.
The rebuilding money is nearly all decided
Castro Almeida also updated MPs on the grants of up to 10,000 euros offered to households repairing storm-damaged homes. Applications came from residents of 175 municipalities, and 35,908 of them have now been closed, either paid or refused. That is 93 percent of the total.
Almost all of the remainder sits in a single municipality, which the minister declined to name. "There are 2,100 files unresolved," he said. "If we take that council out, we would be at 98 percent." He volunteered only that it is not Leiria, which closed its last file in August after processing 10,807 applications, close to a third of the national total.
He also said almost 40 percent of applications were refused, and added that a refusal is not by itself evidence of fraud. Where fraud is suspected, he has instructed officials to refer the case to the Ministério Público (Public Prosecution Service). He would not elaborate.
Why the empty tender matters
Portugal's storm and fire seasons now follow a reliable pattern: an event knocks out electricity, the phone network follows it down, and the smallest councils improvise. The Provedor de Justiça (Ombudsman) reviewed the Kristin response in August and recommended a national catastrophe fund partly on those grounds.
A generator in every parish council is the cheapest piece of that whole problem, and it is the piece that no supplier came forward to sell. With the tender to be rewritten and re-run, the coming winter will be faced with much the same equipment as the last one.
