Days after devastating wildfires ripped through Chile’s Pacific coast, ravaging entire neighborhoods and trapping people fleeing in cars, officials said Sunday that at least 99 people had been killed and hundreds were still missing, and warned that the death toll could rise sharply. .
“This number will increase, we know it will increase significantly,” President Gabriel Boric said Sunday, describing the fires in the Valparaiso region as the country’s worst disaster since the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 400 people. dead and displaced 1.5 million.
“We are facing a tragedy of enormous proportions,” said the president, who visited the fire and announced the nation would observe two days of mourning. He said the top priority was to recover the bodies of the victims.
Thousands of homes have been destroyed by the flames, which have swept through hilly settlements around the resort of Viña del Mar since Friday, fanned by strong winds. A regional state of emergency was declared and a night curfew was imposed.
The fires broke out as many were on summer vacation in Viña del Mar, a city of about 330,000 people, and swept through the smaller neighboring towns of Quilpué, Limache and Villa Alemana. In some areas on the hillside, many elderly residents were unable to escape.
Omar Castro Vázquez, whose house was destroyed in the El Olivar settlement, said an older neighbor died in the fire.
“It was more like a nuclear bomb than fire,” said Mr Castro Vasquez, 72. “There’s nothing left.”
The devastation in the Valparaiso region came as dozens of fires were burning across central and southern Chile amid what officials said were warmer than normal temperatures for the season.
Several other countries in South America also struggled to contain the fires. Colombia has seen dozens of fires break out in recent weeks, including in the capital Bogota, as the country has experienced a period of drought. Firefighters are battling the flames in Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina.
The cyclical climate phenomenon known as El Niño has exacerbated droughts and high temperatures in parts of the continent, creating conditions that experts say are ripe for wildfires.
The Valparaiso wildfires raced toward the coast as winds picked up Friday.
Several fires, which also threatened the port of Valparaiso, burned by Friday night. Authorities began to realize the extent of the damage on Saturday.
Chile’s Interior Minister Carolina Tohá said Sunday that authorities hoped the improved conditions – cooler temperatures, higher humidity and less wind – would help firefighters suppress hot spots and rescue workers reach charred areas to remove dead bodies.
In the early hours of Sunday, bands of smoke clung to the hillsides above Viña del Mar. Along a highway to the coast, earth banks and bridges burned and tree stumps burned on hillsides. The charred husks of cars littered the streets.
Early signs point to faulty evacuation orders, which some residents said may have contributed to the death toll.
Photos posted on social media platform X showed long lines of burning cars that appeared to be engulfed in flames as people tried to flee Viña del Mar, drawing comparisons to the failed evacuation during last year’s wildfire in Lahaina, Maui. Hawaiian.
Chile’s national disaster agency, Senapred, said the warnings had been in place since Friday and gave people evacuation instructions but did not order them to leave.
Regina Figueroa, 53, a resident of the Villa Independencia settlement outside Viña del Mar, said she received a cellphone alert with evacuation instructions on Friday, when the fire had already approached her home.
“I got the alarm,” he said, “and ran out into the street. When I got out into the street, the flames were already around the corner.”
Mrs. Figueroa took her 5-year-old grandson, she said. The flames were so close, he could feel the heat as he ran. He stopped and dunked the crying boy in a pool to cool him off, he said, then proceeded to climb a ladder to escape.
“The sky was black,” he said. “You couldn’t see anything. Everyone was screaming, yelling instructions, yelling into the wind.”
She reached the top of the stairs and stopped to catch her breath, crying.
“I couldn’t believe we were alive. But we were the lucky ones,” he said. “I lost my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law. They died calcified on the road because they couldn’t escape the flames.”
Several blocks of Villa Independencia were decimated by fire.
In El Olivar, Mr Castro Vazquez said residents had taken refuge in a local square when the cellphone alert came.
Black smoke billowed over a hill from a botanical garden on the other side of the hill, he said, and within minutes their community was engulfed in towering orange flames.
Another resident, Andrés Calderón, 40, said many people in the neighborhood did not want to leave their homes, fearing thieves would break into them.
When he got the alert, Mr. Calderon said he jumped in his car and drove through smoke so thick he said he had to turn on his headlights.
“It was like entering hell,” Mr. Calderon said. “I couldn’t see, the wind was blowing the car almost off the road. I just kept driving.”
By Sunday, the area, which was a mix of decades-old public housing and makeshift housing, was reduced to rubble. The sides of the road were covered with corrugated metal sheets and the debris was pushed into piles, all blackened and smelling of smoke.
Mr Castro Vasquez, a retired dock worker, said he lost all his clothes, belongings, documents and a chunk of his pension, which he had withdrawn and kept in cash.
Residents helped each other clear debris and burned appliances from the shells of houses.
“I haven’t cried, I haven’t come to terms with it. I just focus on cleaning my house and my neighbor’s,” said Mr. Castro Vasquez. “We are broken.”
In the hills around Viña del Mar, police and coroners began arriving on Sunday afternoon. Police picked through the debris, asking locals if they had seen any bodies.
Some survivors said they saw people engulfed in flames two stories up. Others described seeing corpses littering the stairs.
Many residents in the settlements said they were stranded without help or even information as their cell phones ran out of batteries and the power went out. They said they had been left largely alone to respond to the disaster. Shelters set up for displaced people were too far away to be useful, many said.
In the Las Praderas area, some survivors huddled in the shadows, while others huddled over the twisted ruins of their homes. A taxi handed out bottled water and empanadas as a first-year medical student was treated for minor injuries.
The mayor of Viña del Mar, Macarena Ripamonti, said in a press conference on Sunday morning that since Saturday night, 372 people in the municipality are missing. He said officials will ensure that the bodies of those who died in the fires are removed as soon as possible.
“They are our neighbors, they are our family, they are our friends, they are people from Viña del Mar. This moves the population,” he said. “People are living the worst situation.”
Natalie Alcoba contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.
