PEDROGAO GRANDE, Portugal (Reuters) - More than 1,000 firefighters were still battling Portugal’s deadliest forest blaze on Monday after it killed dozens over the weekend, and a fireman died from his injuries in a hospital, bringing the death toll to at least 63. More than 70 people, including 13 firefighters, were taken to hospital on Monday with burns and injuries as the fires ravaged the central districts of Leiria and Castelo Branco. Prime Minister Antonio Costa, who on Sunday visited the affected a mountainous area about 200 kilometers (125 miles) northeast of Lisbon, called it the biggest human tragedy in Portugal in living memory. Local reports said a third of the population had lost their lives, many as they tried to escape the fire. Read on 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Gareth Roberts: 'You could hear the roar of the fire coming... we just sat and waited to die' 
 
 Next to the village, 30 bodies were found inside cars, with another 17 next to the vehicles, on the N-236 road, which leads on to the IC8 motorway. Officials said on Monday that 135 people had been injured by the fires, including more than a dozen firefighters. The residents, including a disabled 95-year-old woman, spent more than six hours in the tank as the fire prevented them from being rescued. “It could have been our village.” 
 
 Civil protection commander Elisio Oliveira said the firefighting efforts were progressing well, but the fire was not yet under control. Image copyright Reuters Image caption The fire hit the central forested region of Pedrógão Grande 
 
 The fires began on Saturday in the Pedrógão Grande region during an intense heatwave and rainless thunderstorms, with temperatures of more than 40C (104F) in some areas.
– "It was like a horror movie," says a survivor of Portugal's deadliest fire on record, and like in a horror movie, she survived by finding a good hiding spot. The BBC reports Maria do Céu Silva and 11 others made it through the fearsome blaze by hiding for more than six hours in the water tank outside her home in Nodeirinho, which sits adjacent to the IC8 motorway that ended up littered with bodies of those trying to flee. Silva says the idea came to her after she was unable to get her 95-year-old disabled mother in a van to exit the area. More than 2,000 firefighters continue to battle the fires, one of which killed 62 people some 90 miles north of Lisbon, as authorities are coming under mounting criticism for not doing more to prevent the tragedy, reports the AP. Portugal's leading environmental lobby group, Quercus, issued a statement Monday blaming the blazes on "forest management errors and bad political decisions" over recent decades. The association rebuked authorities for allowing the planting of huge swathes of eucalyptus, the country's most common and most profitable species—but one that's often blamed for stoking blazes. Emergency services have been criticized for not closing a road where 47 of the deaths occurred as people fled the flames. Wildfires are an annual scourge in Portugal: Between 1993 and 2013, Portugal recorded the highest annual number of forest fires in southern Europe, per a 2016 report by the European Environment Agency. Reuters reports that police believe the blaze began when lightning hit a tree.