Chile wildfires rage for 3rd day as toll rises to 20

LIRQUEN, Chile — Wildfires that have killed 20 people in southern Chile and wiped out entire towns raged for the third day Monday, fanned by warm temperatures and strong winds at the height of the southern hemisphere summer.

The blazes started on Saturday in the Nuble and Biobio regions — about 500 kilometers south of the capital Santiago.

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.

A "state of catastrophe" was announced in the Nuble and Biobio regions, allowing for the deployment of soldiers who patrolled a desolate landscape of melted cars, twisted metal and houses reduced to rubble.

"It was horrible. I tried to wet the house as much as possible, but I saw the flames coming toward my neighborhood. I grabbed my son, my brother got my dog out, and we fled," Yagora Vasquez, a resident of the small port town of Lirquen, which was particularly hard hit, told AFP.

Residents returned to what remained of their homes on Monday, 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.

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".

'Much more devastating'

"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-story house she lived in with her family for nearly two decades, only blackened walls and a haze of smoke remained.

More than 3,500 firefighters were fighting the fires in Nuble and Biobio on Monday.

Temperatures in the area hit around 25 C on Monday, slightly lower than at the weekend.

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 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 simultaneously near the city of Vina del Mar, northwest of Santiago, resulting in 138 deaths, according to the public prosecutor's office.

In an unprecedented incident, large areas of the country burned during the 2016-17 and 2022-23 fire seasons.

Extreme weather characterized the beginning of 2026. Latin American countries are preparing to confront large-scale heat waves and wildfires.

Brazil is experiencing a period of significant extreme weather in early 2026. A severe heat wave is affecting southeastern regions, including Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, with temperatures exceeding 40 C. Health authorities have issued alerts, and increased energy consumption for cooling is straining the power grid.

In Argentina, a wildfire happened in Chubut early January. Authorities in Chubut believe the fire was intentionally caused, and judicial investigators are working to corroborate the charge.

Local media believed the extreme weather conditions of historic drought, high temperatures, and strong winds severely complicated the work of the firefighters and favored the fire's advance toward populated areas, the newspaper Jornada reports.

Agencies Via Xinhua