Summer is closing in the Southern Cone amid climatic tragedies in the Pacific and the Atlantic. If in Chile fire is the destructive element, in Brazil it is water, in both cases with virulence and intensities rarely seen.
A single week in February, the first, was enough for Chile to burn a number of hectares equivalent to those lost in two years of fires. And in Brazil, the coast of the State of Sao Paulo and part of that of Santa Catarina saw more rain fall in one day than ever before: 683 millimeters in 15 hours in municipalities such as Sao Sebastiao or Bertioga. These towns, which are normally paradisiacal beaches, are located less than 200 kilometers from Sao Paulo, the largest city in the West. In Chile, 24 people died, in Brazil, 64 and there are 40 missing. And the numbers could continue to grow.
The tragedy was conceived in the south, with the advance of a cold front of unprecedented power that led Buenos Aires to experience the highest temperatures in the last half century in February (38.1) and, just five days later, the lowest in 62 years, with 6.9 degrees. February, in most of the territory of countries like Chile, Argentina or Brazil, is equivalent to Spanish August: temperatures below ten degrees in a city like Buenos Aires are a profound anomaly.
“When this front passed through Argentina, there was talk of the most intense cold front in the last 54 years. It was not just any cold front,” meteorologist Marcelo Seluchi, from the National Center for Monitoring and Alerts of Natural Disasters (Cemaden) told BBC Brasil. ). “This low pressure also caused an increase in wind from the sea. So this event brought in moisture and raised the sea level. As the sea level rose, it was much more difficult to drain rainwater.”
What Seluchi describes led to horrifying images, with the water devastating towns and the sea entering normally off-limits land. Most of the deaths affected the lower social classes, and there is an explanation for this: the fierce real estate speculation that devastates the coveted areas of the coast.
The Serra do Mar, a mountain range that collapsed in some sections, has very high slopes, with little land on top of the rocks and works like a wall against the clouds. The combination of the three factors leads to frequent rains that generate floods with some frequency.
And for almost half a century, land has been occupied in the coastal zone, houses and buildings have been built for the middle, upper-middle and upper classes who yearn to live next to the beach. These homes, in many cases, do not have legal property titles, but the de facto occupation of the land leads people with fewer resources to move to live on the slopes of the surrounding hills. When the water attacks, they are the most vulnerable.
There is also no siren system in the area to warn of danger, like what happens in tsunami areas. Tarcisio De Freitas, the governor of Sao Paulo, promised to remedy that problem. “We have to create a local alert system and train the population,” added Integration Minister Walder Góes.
In Chile, President Gabriel Boric declared a state of emergency in various regions of the country. Carolina Tohá, the Minister of the Interior, gave an idea of the magnitude of the tragedy: “In just five days what is usually burned in two years has been burned.”
“In recent years, our country has experienced the ravages of climate change. We are becoming one of the world’s most vulnerable territories to fires,” Boric warned.
“Climate change has advanced faster than expected in those years,” Alejandro Miranda, a researcher at the Center for Climate Science and Resilience (CR2), told the Mongabay site.
“Extensive forest plantations generate homogeneous landscapes, with a high fuel load and with species such as pine and eucalyptus that, in their evolutionary development, have adapted to fire, even allowing them to regenerate quickly after a fire. Therefore, continuity of these crops contributes to the development of large-scale fires, since they are found mostly in areas exposed to droughts and heat waves,” he added.
Spain provided its aid to Chile with the deployment of the Military Emergency Unit (UME): this includes six advisers from its headquarters, 38 soldiers from the Emergency Intervention Battalion and six drone pilots.
“This is an injection of solidarity that we are very grateful for,” said Minister Tohá, who as Minister of the Interior is, in fact, number two in the Chilean government, which does not include the position of vice president in its institutional organization chart. Chile is “far away in kilometers, but close in the heart” of Spain, stressed Defense Minister Margarita Robles.
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