Chile wildfires rage for third day, entire towns wiped out

Smoke and flames billow from burning houses during a wildfire in Concepcion, Chile. Chilean President Gabriel Boric has declared a state of emergency. Photo / Guillermo Salgado, AFP

Wildfires that have killed 19 people in southern Chile and wiped-out entire towns, raged for a third day today, fanned by high temperatures and strong winds at the height of the summer.

The blazes started in the Nuble and Biobio regions - about 500km south of Santiago.

Both were declared disaster areas to allow for the emergency deployment of soldiers and a night-time curfew was imposed in the hardest-hit areas, whose residents reeled from the widespread devastation.

“It was horrible. I tried to wet the house as much as possible, but I saw the flames coming toward my neighbourhood. I grabbed my son, 7, my brother got my dog out, and we fled,” Yagora Vasquez, a resident of the small port town of Lirquen in Biobio told AFP.

The streets of the area where she has lived for 15 years were littered with charred cars.

Soldiers patrolled the streets as residents returned to what remained of their homes, digging through the rubble and ash to salvage what they could.

Vasquez told AFP she had chosen to live in Lirquen - on a hill far from the sea - after seeing the devastation wrought by the tsunami of 2010 that killed more than 500 people in the same region of Chile.

This time the threat came from the 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, only blackened walls and a haze of smoke remained.

More than 3500 firefighters were battling 14 wildfires in Nuble and Biobio as winds reached speeds of over 70km/h and temperatures were predicted to hit about 30C.

The director of the Senapred disaster response service said that “the most significant fires are not under control”.

And President Gabriel Boric said on X, “the weather conditions during the day will not be good, so it is possible that hot spots may reactivate”.

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 Centre 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.

Unprecedently large areas of the country burned during the 2016/17 and 2022/23 fire seasons.

Elsewhere in southern South America, wildfires have burned more than 15,000ha in recent days in Argentine Patagonia.

-Agence France-Presse