“Since June we have had more than 1,500 people involved on the ground, to rapidly and effectively respond to the replacement of the more than 12,000 posts ... and more than 1.000 kilometres of cable burned," said Alexandre Fonseca, head of the company's technological department, at a news conference in Lisbon to present details of work in the wake of the fires.

According to Fonseca, the work was undertaken "in almost a hundred municipalities" in more than half Portugal's 18 mainland districts.

In 'Operation Pedrógão Grande', in six municipalities in central Portugal where 53,000 hectares burned, more than 500 kilometres of copper and optic-fibre cable had burned (out of a total of 1,350 kilometres of overhead cables that the company has in the region).

The company “immediately mobilised more than two hundred people and a hundred vehicles on the ground” to deal with “the scale of the fire and the some thirteen thousand clients ... in this area".

As a result, he said, the company achieved "the recovery of ninety-eight percent of our service in a period of four and a half days." Some work took place even as the fires continued to burn, so that “the overwhelming majority of the network and services were recovered in less than a week."

Elsewhere, work on a smaller scale was undertaken in Mação, Ferreira do Zêzere, Sertã, Gavião, Castelo Branco, Tomar, Mangualde, Oliveira do Hospital and other municipalities affected by fires in recent months.

PT has been criticised for relying on overhead cables for its network in forested areas, instead of burying them. Communications went down in large swathes of central Portugal swept by fires in June, including emergency communications used by fire fighters and police, with deadly consequences.

In Pedrógão Grande itself 64 people died in the June fires - most of them as they fled along a road that should have been closed by police but was not, in part because communications were down. Government officials have said that PT was partly to blame, although an official inquiry into the incident continues.