Wild fires ravaging through Chile have killed at least 10 people, government officials said. Civilians and fire fighters are among the dead. 1000s of survivors have no home to go back to, the fires destroying entire villages.
The blazes that started ripping through Chile started just over a week ago, fueled by strong wind and drought conditions, the perfect combination to keep a fire burning. They are reportedly, the worst fires the country has seen in it’s year history. Earlier this week when visiting the Maule region, President Michelle Bachelet said the following.
“We have never seen anything on this scale, never in the history of Chile, the truth is that the forces are doing everything humanly possible and will continue until they can contain and control the fires.”
Locals are doing what they can to save their homes, animals, and farmlands, having to resort to buckets and garden hoses to tackle the fires. It’s not an easy task. “This is an extremely serious situation of horror, a nightmare without an end,” Carlos Valenzuela, the mayor of the coastal city of Constitucion, told a German broadcaster. “Everything burned.”
Though fires aren’t an uncommon occurrence around this time of year, they are nearly never this disastrous. Though the main causes are local weather patterns, a review of the country’s wildfires published last November in Global and Planetary Change stated that another cause of the alarming rate at which wildfires in the country are occurring is intensive forest management practices that lead to a large amount of flammable fuel in the country’s forests. That, combined with the increment in the area planted with flammable species and the rejection of those modifications on the part of local communities that seek to target the modified plantations in arson attacks.
The Chilean government has appealed for aid from other nations. The U.S. Embassy in Santiago stated earlier this week that the U.S. government was donating $100,000 to Chile “for the local procurement and delivery of firefighting equipment, such as chainsaws and weather monitoring tools requested by the National Forestry Corporation.” This past Wednesday, a privately owned Boeing 747 arrived to help control the fires from the air. Planes like the Boeing 747 are able to dump as much as 20,000 gallons of flame retardant out to tame fires.
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