Soldiers patrolled the streets as residents returned to what remained of their homes, digging through the rubble and ash to salvage what they could.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This time the threat came from the forest.<\/p>\n
\u2018A wave of fire\u2019<\/p>\n
Mareli Torres similarly moved away from the coast after the tsunami, only for her home to be destroyed this weekend in \u201ca wave of fire, not water\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is much worse, much more devastating. In the earthquake the sea surged, there was destruction, but compared to this it\u2019s nothing,\u201d said Torres, 53.<\/p>\n
Of the two-storey house she lived in with her family, only blackened walls and a haze of smoke remained.<\/p>\n
More than 3500 firefighters were battling 14 wildfires in Nuble and Biobio as winds reached speeds of over 70km\/h and temperatures were predicted to hit about 30C.<\/p>\n
The director of the Senapred disaster response service said that \u201cthe most significant fires are not under control\u201d.<\/p>\n
And President Gabriel Boric said on X, \u201cthe weather conditions during the day will not be good, so it is possible that hot spots may reactivate\u201d.<\/p>\n
Wildfires have severely impacted south-central Chile in recent years, especially in its warmest and driest months of January and February.<\/p>\n
A 2024 study led by researchers at the Santiago-based Centre for Climate and Resilience Research, found climate change had \u201cconditioned the occurrence of extreme fire seasons in south-central Chile\u201d by contributing to a long-term drying and warming trend.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
Unprecedently large areas of the country burned during the 2016\/17 and 2022\/23 fire seasons.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in southern South America, wildfires have burned more than 15,000ha in recent days in Argentine Patagonia.<\/p>\n
-Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Soldiers patrolled the streets as residents returned to what remained of their homes, digging through the rubble and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[25291,5972,20209,273,141997,2082,305,83594,2959,3375,111,139,69,3111,384,29225,92644,147,171,18835,14625,38666,1361,3755,1865,6699,4143,18980,39042,141996],"class_list":["post-241516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-chile","tag-day","tag-entire","tag-environment","tag-fanned","tag-for","tag-have","tag-height","tag-high","tag-killed","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-out","tag-people","tag-rage","tag-raged","tag-science","tag-southern","tag-strong","tag-summer","tag-temperatures","tag-that","tag-third","tag-today","tag-towns","tag-wildfires","tag-winds","tag-wiped","tag-wipedout"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}