No fewer than 19 people have died following wildfires blazing across central and southern Chile officials said on Sunday, warning the toll was likely to climb as responders comb through burnt-out homes and the flames continue to spread.
President Gabriel Boric has decreed a state of emergency “due to catastrophe” over the fires, as dry conditions in the area and temperatures soaring to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) exacerbate the crisis.
The blazes are concentrated in the Valparaiso tourist region, along central Chile’s coastline, where they have ravaged thousands of hectares of forest, cloaked coastal cities in a dense fog of gray smoke and forced people to flee their homes.
Authorities declared a curfew for Saturday morning in the two regions until noon (1500 GMT) to facilitate the movement of evacuees and emergency responders.
“There are 19 people dead,” Interior Minister Carolina Toha said Saturday, noting that the toll is “very provisional” because responders have not yet been able to enter some affected areas.
She said there were 92 active fires, with 43,000 hectares (106,000 acres) burned across the country.
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“The priority is on the fires in the Valparaiso region because of their proximity to urban areas, where we have several fires,” said Toha.
She said more firefighting vehicles were not required at the moment because the area “is not very large. It is very dense, but not very extensive.”
In the hillsides around the coastal city of Vina del Mar, entire blocks of homes were burned out overnight, AFP reporters saw Saturday morning.
Some dead victims could be seen lying in the road covered in sheets.
The area, about 1.5 hours northwest of the capital Santiago, is a popular tourist destination during the hot summer months.
In the towns of Estrella and Navidad, southwest of the capital, the fires have burned nearly 30 homes, and forced evacuations near the surfing resort of Pichilemu.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” 63-year-old Yvonne Guzman told AFP. When the flames started to close in on her home in Quilpue, she fled with her elderly mother, only to be trapped in traffic for hours.
“It’s very distressing, because we’ve evacuated the house but we can’t move forward. There are all these people trying to get out and who can’t move,” she said.
“All forces are deployed in the fight against the forest fires,” Boric said Friday in a message posted to social media platform X.
Around 7,000 hectares have been burned in Valparaiso alone, according to CONAF, the Chilean national forest authority, which called the blazes “extreme.”
Images filmed by trapped motorists have gone viral online, showing mountains in flames at the end of the famous “Route 68,” a road used by thousands of tourists to get to the Pacific coast beaches.
In addition to Valparaiso, firefighters and emergency services personnel are battling 10 outbreaks affecting regions in the center and south of the country, including O’Higgins, Maule, Biobio, La Araucania and Los Lagos.
On Friday, authorities closed the road linking Valparaiso to the capital Santiago, as a huge mushroom cloud of smoke “reduced visibility.”
The fires are being driven by a summer heatwave and drought affecting the southern part of South America caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon, as scientists warn that a warming planet has increased the risk of natural disasters such as intense heat and fires.
As Chile and Colombia battle rising temperatures, the heatwave is also threatening to sweep over Paraguay and Brazil.