Six Months After Storm Kristin, 25 People Still Cannot Return to Their Homes
Half a year after Storm Kristin battered central Portugal, 25 people across six municipalities in the Leiria and Lisbon districts remain in temporary housing. More than 35,900 recovery applications and 179,000 insurance claims are still working through the system.
Six months after Storm Kristin tore across central Portugal, twenty-five people still cannot go home. Spread across six municipalities in the districts of Leiria and Lisbon, they remain in temporary accommodation — with relatives, in council-arranged rooms or in tourist lodging pressed into service — because the houses they left in January are still not fit to live in. Their number is small against the scale of the disaster, but it is the sharpest measure of how slowly the recovery is grinding on.
Kristin, the post-tropical depression that swept the country over the winter, was one of the most damaging storms in recent memory. According to Paulo Fernandes, who coordinates the government's reconstruction mission, more than 200,000 people and homes were directly affected, from stripped roofs and flooded ground floors to felled trees and severed power and telephone lines. The worst of it fell on the Leiria region, where whole neighbourhoods lost tiles, windows and outbuildings in a single night.
Half a year on, the paperwork tells the story of a recovery still very much in motion. Some 35,908 applications have been lodged for the government's housing-recovery support, and a further 179,046 claims have gone to insurers — a mountain of files that will take, in officials' own words, "months or years" to fully process. In Leiria alone, the municipality says it received around 10,000 requests for help and has managed to respond to roughly 70% of them, leaving thousands of households still waiting.
The bottleneck is no longer the weather but the rebuilding itself. Across the affected area there are still houses without roofs, patched for now with tarpaulins against the summer sun and the autumn rains to come. Owners and mayors point to the same twin obstacles: support payments that arrive slowly and unevenly, and a shortage of builders and roofers to carry out the repairs even where the money has been approved. Portugal's construction sector was already stretched before the storm; the surge of simultaneous demand across dozens of towns has pushed waiting lists out for months.
Other scars are less visible. In Abrantes, six months after the storm, around 1,600 households were still struggling with patchy internet and phone connections, and fallen trees left rotting in the countryside remain a hazard as the wildfire season peaks. Local leaders have bristled at the pace of the state's response, and the government has in turn rejected the criticism, insisting that a damage assessment on this scale simply cannot be completed quickly.
For the twenty-five people still shut out of their homes, those arguments are academic. Their situation is a reminder that a storm's headline passes in a night, but its consequences can stretch across seasons — and that behind the aggregate figures of applications and euros sit families who have now spent half a year without a front door of their own to close. Officials say the aim is to bring the remaining displaced residents home before the winter returns, though on current form that will be a close-run thing.
