 "Firefighters stand in front of a burning building in the aftermath of a forest fire in the Biobio region where multiple wildfires prompted emergency evacuations in Concepcion. Reuters")
Wildfires continue to ravage southern Chile, killing at least 19 people and destroying entire towns. Fire crews and soldiers have been deployed as the rapidly advancing flames, fuelled by extreme heat and strong winds, overwhelm large areas.
The fires broke out on Saturday in the Nuble and Biobío regions, about 500 kilometres south of Santiago, and have since burned through an area roughly equivalent to the size of the US city of Detroit.
Officials said around 1,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged. The fires have been intensified by warm temperatures and strong winds during the peak of the southern hemisphere summer.
President Gabriel Boric said on Monday that firefighters had managed to contain some of the fires. However, he warned that several remained “very active”. He added that new fires had also broken out in the Araucania region, which borders Biobio.
Both Nuble and Biobio were declared disaster areas. The designation allowed for the deployment of soldiers, who patrolled areas marked by melted cars, twisted metal and homes reduced to rubble.
Residents return to scenes of destruction
In the small port town of Lirquen, one of the worst affected areas, residents began returning on Monday to search through ash and debris for anything salvageable.
“It was horrible. I tried to wet the house as much as possible, but I saw the flames coming toward my neighborhood. I grabbed my son, my brother got my dog out, and we fled,” resident Yagora Vasquez told AFP.
Quick Reads
View AllVasquez said she had chosen to live in Lirquen, on a hill far from the sea, after witnessing the destruction caused by the 2010 tsunami. That disaster killed more than 500 people in the same region of Chile.
This time, she said, the danger came not from the ocean, but from the surrounding forest.
A wave of fire
Mareli Torres similarly moved away from the coast after the tsunami, only for her home to be destroyed this weekend in “a wave of fire, not water.”
“This is much worse, much more devastating. In the earthquake the sea surged; there was destruction, but compared to this it’s nothing,” said Torres, 53.
Of the two-storey house she lived in with her family for nearly two decades, only blackened walls and a haze of smoke remained.
More than 3,500 firefighters were fighting the fires in Nuble and Biobio on Monday.
Temperatures in the area hit around 25°C (77°F) on Monday, slightly lower than at the weekend.
Wildfires have severely impacted south-central Chile in recent years, especially in its warmest and driest months of January and February.
A 2024 study led by researchers at the Santiago-based Center for Climate and Resilience Research, found climate change had “conditioned the occurrence of extreme fire seasons in south-central Chile” by contributing to a long-term drying and warming trend.
In February 2024, several fires broke out simultaneously near the city of Vina del Mar, northwest of Santiago, resulting in 138 deaths, according to the public prosecutor’s office.
Unprecedentedly large areas of the country burnt during the 2016-17 and 2022-23 fire seasons.
Elsewhere in southern South America, wildfires have burnt more than 15,000 hectares in recent days in Argentine Patagonia.
(With agency inputs)