Sawt Falasteen - Chile wildfires rage for third day, entire towns wiped out

The blazes started Saturday in the Nuble and Biobio regions -- about 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of Chile's capital Santiago.

Both were declared disaster areas to allow for the emergency deployment of soldiers and a nighttime curfew was imposed in the hardest-hit areas, whose residents reeled from the widespread devastation.

"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 (7), my brother got my dog out, and we fled," Yagora Vasquez, a resident of the small port town of Lirquen in Biobio told AFP.

On Monday morning, the streets of the neighborhood where she has lived for 15 years were littered with charred cars.

Soldiers patrolled the streets as residents returned to what remained of their homes, 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.

- 'A wave of fire' -

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."

"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 battling 14 wildfires in Nuble and Biobio Monday as winds reached speeds of over 70 kilometers (43 miles) per hour and temperatures were predicted to hit about 30C (86F).

After a brief respite overnight, the director of the Senapred disaster response service said Monday that "the most significant fires are not under control."

And President Gabriel Boric said on X, "the weather conditions during the day will not be good, so it is possible that hot spots may reactivate."

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.

Unprecedently large areas of the country burnt during the 2016/17 and 2022/23 fire seasons.

Elsewhere in southern South America, wildfires have burnt more than 15,000 hectares in recent days in Argentine Patagonia.

C.Hamad--SF-PST