Concepción, Chile | AFP
Firefighters battling major wildfires in southern Chile which have killed 20 people over the past four days benefited from cooler weather early Tuesday, authorities said.
“We had a better night thanks to weather conditions. That means that we did not have to issue alerts” for evacuations, Interior Minister Alvaro Elizalde told reporters.
A light drizzle fell Tuesday morning on the city of Concepcion, about 500 kilometers south of Santiago in Biobio, one of two regions where entire neighborhoods have been gutted by fires since Saturday.
The blazes, which have also swept through parts of Nuble region, have scorched 35,000 hectares (86,000 acres), an area the size of the US city of Detroit.
Around 1,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, officials said.
President Gabriel Boric said Monday that firefighters had managed to contain some of the blazes but that others remained “very active” and that new fires had broken out in the Araucania region bordering Biobio.
More than 3,500 firefighters have been deployed to extinguish the flames.
Several fires which had been dormant were fanned back to flame Monday in the town of Florida, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Concepcion.
“At lunchtime, the fire started spreading in our neighborhood, putting many people in danger,” Jorge Flores, a 50-year-old Florida resident, told AFP.
On Tuesday, authorities announced that they had arrested a man in the coastal town of Penco, one of the areas worst-hit by the fires, on suspicion of trying to ignite a new blaze.
Parts of Penco and the adjacent port of Lirquen have been reduced to a blackened landscape of fire-gutted homes, melted cars and twisted metal.
Residents have been digging through rubble and ash seeking to salvage what remains of their homes and belongings.
Wildfires have severely impacted south-central Chile in recent years, especially in its warmest and driest summer 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 near the city of Vina del Mar, northwest of Santiago, resulting in 138 deaths, according to the public prosecutor’s office.
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Press Release/Material by Axl Hernandez | AFP
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