Chile wildfires kill 19 amid extreme heat; scores evacuated

PENCO: Wildfires in Chile have killed at least 19 people, authorities said on Monday, as the government carried out mass evacuations and fought over 30 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 Caamano, 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,” Caamano said, looking at the rings in her hand. “But they’re memories.”

Caamano 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 late Monday afternoon, Chile’s CONAF forestry agency said firefighters were combating 34 fires across the country, the largest of which were in regions of Nuble and Bio Bio, where President Gabriel Boric declared a state of catastrophe.

Over 35,000 hectares (135 square miles) have been razed so far, an area about the size of Philadelphia, with the largest fire surpassing 14,000 hectares on the outskirts of the coastal city of Concepcion.

Miguel Castillo, a professor and researcher at the University of Chile’s Forest Fire Laboratory, said a number of factors made the recent fires so deadly, including the amount of dry material and persistent high temperatures.

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“There have been several consecutive days over 30 degrees (Celsius) and for the Concepcion area that’s rare,” Castillo said. “One or two days are common, but not four or five.”

Castillo added that fires are more difficult to put out once they reach a certain size and have been complicating by strong, shifting winds.

“With those extreme conditions, it practically becomes an uncontrollable monster,” he said, adding that most fires last two or three days, but the risk is multiple active fires combining before authorities can control them.

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.