Chile | At least 19 dead in fires

(Viña del Mar) At least 19 people were killed in fires which had already ravaged nearly 43,000 hectares in Chile on Saturday, notably in the tourist region of Valparaiso, on the Pacific coast of the country plagued by scorching temperatures.

“This is an unprecedented disaster, the Valparaiso region has never experienced a situation of this magnitude,” said Macarena Ripamonti, mayor of the famous seaside resort of Viña del Mar, which was particularly affected.

In total, 92 fires were active at midday on Saturday, including 40 under control, mainly in the Valparaiso region (west), but also in the center and south of the country, announced Interior Minister Carolina Toha.

Some 43,000 hectares went up in smoke, she added.

Images that have gone viral on social networks, shot by trapped motorists, show the mountains engulfed in flames at the end of the famous “route 68”, a road used by thousands of tourists to get to the beaches of Peaceful.

At least 19 people died in a single sector of Viña del Mar, announced M^me Toha, specifying that this is a “very provisional” assessment, because emergency services have not yet been able to gain access to other sectors also ravaged by the fire.

On the hills of the seaside resort, where the streets are littered with hundreds of charred cars, thousands of people found their homes destroyed on Saturday.

Luis Vial, a 69-year-old retiree, is in tears in front of the rubble of his house, in the Villa Independencia area where the 19 victims were found: “In the space of a minute, we lost everything.”

A curfew was declared Saturday morning in several municipalities in the region to allow evacuees and emergency teams to move around.

Firefighters have been fighting tirelessly since Friday against dozens of homes in the regions of Valparaiso and O’Higgins in the center, but also Maule, Biobio, La Araucania and Los Lagos, in the south.

“The priority is the fires in the Valparaiso region, due to their proximity to urban areas,” declared the Minister of the Interior.

These are areas located between 80 and 120 km northwest of Santiago, rich in wine, agricultural and forestry businesses. Due to their proximity to the Pacific beaches, they experience a large influx of tourists during this period of the austral summer.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric declared a state of emergency in order to “have all the necessary means” in the face of the progression of the fires. “All forces are deployed in the fight against forest fires,” assured the head of state in a message posted on X.

Fourteen ships and five helicopters were mobilized to fight the fires.

Never seen ”

“I had never seen something like this, it’s very distressing, because we evacuated the house, but we can’t move forward, all these people trying to get out and who can’t move,” Yvonne had confided earlier Guzmán, reached by telephone by AFP.

This 63-year-old administrator, who abandoned her home in Quilpué, a town located 90 kilometers northeast of Santiago, was then “stranded” in her car with her nonagenarian mother-in-law.

“We received an alert on the cell phone and a rain of burning ashes started to fall,” she said, while messages from her neighbors warned her that the flames were approaching her house.

Since Wednesday, the temperature has been close to 40 degrees in central Chile and the capital Santiago.

“These episodes are more and more recurrent, which is why we see historic temperature records every year,” Pablo Lobos Stephani, responsible for fire protection at the Chilean channel, explained to CNN. Chilean national forestry office CONAF.

This heatwave resulting from the El Niño climatic phenomenon is currently affecting the southern cone of Latin America, in the middle of summer, causing forest fires worsened by global warming. After Chile and Colombia, the heat wave threatens Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil in the coming days.