Chile wildfires rage for third day, entire towns wiped out

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

The blazes started Saturday in the Nuble and Biobio regions – about 500km south of the capital Santiago – and have since ripped through 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.

Both Nuble and Biobio were declared disaster areas, 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 neighbourhood. 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.