Forest fires spread in Chile on Friday February 2, enveloping the tourist regions of Vina del Mar and Valparaiso in smoke and killing at least ten people, according to a provisional official count. The fires are threatening hundreds of homes and have led to forced evacuations. The president, Gabriel Boric, declared a state of exception.
Firefighters and emergency services have been intervening for several hours against around ten homes in the regions of Valparaiso and O’Higgins, in the center of the country, but also Maule, Biobio, La Araucania and Los Lagos, in the South, have authorities said.
In the Valparaiso region alone, the fire devoured 480 hectares, according to CONAF, the Chilean national forestry office.
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 go to the beaches of Peaceful.
“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,” confides Yvonne Guzman, reached by telephone. by Agence France-Presse.
“Rain of burning ashes”
This 63-year-old administrator, who abandoned her home in Quilpué, a town 90 kilometers northeast of Santiago, has been patient for two hours, “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 says, while messages from her neighbors warn her that the flames are approaching her house.
Since Wednesday, the temperature has been close to 40 degrees in central Chile and the capital Santiago.
Authorities had halted traffic on Friday due to “reduced visibility due to smoke” on Route 68, which connects Santiago to Valparaiso and leads to the wine region of Casablanca and the seaside resort of Vina del Mar.
“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 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.