Wildfires in Chile have left at least 19 people dead, authorities said on Monday, as the government carried out mass evacuations and fought nearly two dozen blazes exacerbated by intense heat and high winds. While weather conditions overnight helped control some fires, the largest were still active, with adverse conditions expected throughout the day, security minister Luis Cordero said at a news briefing on Monday.
“The projection we have today is of high temperatures,” Cordero said, and the main worry was that new fires would be triggered throughout the region. Parts of central and southern Chile were under extreme heat warnings with temperatures expected to reach up to 37 Celsius (99 Fahrenheit).
HUNDREDS OF HOMES DESTROYED Most of those killed were in Penco, a small coastal city just north of the regional capital of Concepcion. On Monday morning, thousands of residents in the area sifted through the rubble of their homes as firefighters continued to extinguish nearby fires.
Ana Caamaño, 51, was one of those residents, rummaging through the ashes of the home in Lirquen that she was raised in and later inherited from her parents. Among the wreckage was the corpse of one of her four dogs, some charred rings and a metal ladle. “They’re not that important,” Ana Caamaño said, looking at the rings in her hand. “But they’re memories.”
Caamaño and her husband Luis, who was cleaning up the wreckage of their garage to make a temporary shelter, were visiting family on Saturday when the fires broke out. Their son, Franco, was home and said he was trying to hose down the house when he noticed the blaze getting closer, but a sudden strong wind brought in a black cloud of smoke that forced him to flee, leaving everything behind.
“It came like lightning, it was so quick,” Franco said, echoing what many residents remembered, a fast-moving fire that gave them almost no time to flee. Authorities say 325 homes have been destroyed and 1,100 more are being evaluated.
STATE OF EMERGENCY DECLARED IN NUBLE, BIO BIO As of Monday afternoon, Chile’s CONAF forestry agency said firefighters were combating 26 fires across the country, the largest of which were in regions of Ñuble and Bío Bío, where President Gabriel Boric declared a state of catastrophe.
Over 20,000 hectares (77 square miles) have been razed so far, an area about the size of Seattle, with the largest fire surpassing 14,000 hectares on the outskirts of the coastal city of Concepcion. Authorities are currently battling the fire as it threatens Manzano prison on the edge of Concepcion and the town of Tome to the north.
Both Chile and Argentina rang in the new year with heat waves which have continued into January. Earlier this month, wildfires broke out in Argentina’s Patagonia, burning around 15,000 hectares.
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