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Conflagrations are not new in Chile. On the contrary, each year there are on average more than 6,000. But the flames that hit Valparaíso, in the center of the country, combined a drought of more than a decade, the particularly strong summer heat wave and the agglomeration of houses in areas that should have been preserved as firebreaks.
The second emergency that has caused the most deaths in Chile since the 2010 earthquake. This is how the Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, described the forest fires that hit different regions of the central-southern country, especially Valparaíso. More than 120 people died in the flames.
Behind this lethality there is a combination of several reasons: prolonged drought, dry pastures, a heat wave this summer and the fact that many people had their homes in places where they could not be built. In addition, authorities indicated that there is a possibility that these fires were arson.
A drought that does not end with the rains
Experts agree that the extremes of the climate are at the root of forest fires. And Chile knows a lot about that. Some regions of the country, such as Coquimbo, have been in drought for 16 years. This is when the amount of rainfall remains below the usual average.
The situation was not reversed even with the rains that occurred in 2023 due to the El Niño phenomenon, since the event produces extreme heat in some places on the planet and in others it generates precipitation, as is the case in the southern country.
“The drought itself, statistically, cuts itself. But in terms of water availability, last year's rainfall is not enough to reverse such a long period of below-normal rainfall,” Rodrigo Fuster, researcher at the Advanced Center for Water Technologies (CAPTA), explained to France 24. and the Territorial Analysis Laboratory of the University of Chile.
What those rains did generate was that the plants grew and that vegetation dried up with the summer that came later. “It lost its greenness, it was dry and very prone to burning,” Fuster added.
Added to this type of fuel was the super heat wave that affected central Chile, particularly at the end of January, during the summer. Temperatures exceeded 40ºC, something that is not common there.
The heat was so much that, even before the conflagrations began, some provinces such as Concepción and Biobío went on red alert due to the possibility of forest fires. These places were affected by the fire season in 2023 and, as an omen, they suffered the flames again in 2024.
The flames destroyed the homes that were in the firebreak
Hundreds of forest fires devastated more than 10,000 hectares of regions such as Araucanía, Biobío and the Metropolitan, according to the National Forestry Corporation (Conaf). But the majority of those killed by the conflagrations were concentrated in Valparaíso.
One of the reasons is that many of the houses consumed by the fire had what is known as lightweight materials, which are for example wood and fiber cement. These burn much more easily than bricks or cement, such as He explained it to France 24 Miguel Castillo, director of the Forest Fire Engineering Laboratory of the University of Chile.
Castillo also pointed out that many of the homes were invasive and were built in firebreak areas. That is, in perimeters that are close to forests and that, by law, had to be free to prevent the flames from spreading.
Added to all this is that many of the inhabitants did not heed the evacuation warnings that the authorities sent to their mobile phones, as Chilean President Gabriel Boric said.
In the last 50 years, forest fires in Chile have progressively increased. Well, in the seventies, the average was 2,000 forest fires each year; while between 2013 and 2023, that average was more than 6,700 according to the Conaf data.
The same state agency indicates that 99.7% of conflagrations have been caused, “either by carelessness or negligence in the manipulation of heat sources, or by agricultural practices or by intentionality, originating from different types of motivations, including criminal.”
Simply put, climate extremes set the perfect conditions for wildfires to be more devastating than usual. And in its wake, the flames were enhanced by human decisions.
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