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‘We’re Broken’: Wildfires on Chile’s Coast Kill 112 and Leave Hundreds Missing
Officials are warning of major destruction and loss of life after fast-moving fires swept through central Chile’s coastal hills.
Annie Correal and
John Bartlett and the photographer Cristóbal Olivares traveled to the Valparaíso region of Chile to report on the damage caused by wildfires.
Days after devastating wildfires ripped through Chile’s Pacific Coast, ravaging entire neighborhoods and trapping people fleeing in cars, officials said on Sunday that at least 112 people had been killed and hundreds remained missing and warned that the number of dead could rise sharply.
“That number is going to go up, we know it’s going to go up significantly,” President Gabriel Boric said earlier in the day, when 64 deaths had been confirmed. He described the fires in the Valparaíso region as the worst disaster in the country since a cataclysmic earthquake in 2010 left more than 400 people dead and displaced 1.5 million.
“We’re standing before a tragedy of immense proportions,” said the president, who visited the fire zone and announced that the nation would observe two days of mourning. He said a top priority was to recover the bodies of victims.
Thousands of homes were destroyed in the flames, which swept through the hilly settlements around the resort town of Viña del Mar starting Friday, propelled by high winds. A regional state of emergency was declared and a nighttime curfew imposed.
The fires erupted as many were on summer vacations in Viña del Mar, a city of roughly 330,000, and swept through the smaller neighboring cities of Quilpué, Limache, and Villa Alemana. In some hillside areas, many older residents were not able to escape.
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