Days after devastating fires ravaged 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 remained missing and warned that the death toll could increase dramatically.
“That number will increase, we know it will increase significantly,” President Gabriel Boric said on Sunday, describing the fires in the Valparaíso region as the country’s worst disaster since the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that left more than 400 people dead. 1.5 million people dead and displaced.
“We are faced with a tragedy of immense proportions,” said the president, who visited the fire area and announced that the nation will observe two days of mourning. He said the top priority is to recover the bodies of the victims.
Thousands of homes have been destroyed by the flames, which have ravaged hillside settlements around the resort town of Viña del Mar since Friday, driven by strong winds.
The fires broke out while many were on summer vacation in Viña del Mar, a city of about 330,000, and devastated the smaller nearby towns of Quilpué, Limache and Villa Alemana. In some hilly areas, many older 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 a fire,” said Castro Vázquez, 72. “There’s nothing left.”
The destruction in the Valparaíso region came as dozens of fires were burning in central and southern Chile, amid what officials say are higher-than-normal temperatures for this time of year.
Many other South American countries have also struggled to contain the fires. Colombia has seen dozens of fires break out in recent weeks, including around the capital Bogota, as the country has experienced a spell of dry weather. Firefighters also intervened in Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina.
The cyclical climate phenomenon known as El Niño has exacerbated drought and high temperatures in parts of the continent, creating conditions that experts say are ripe for forest fires.
Valparaiso’s fires moved toward the coast as winds picked up Friday.
The fires swept through the region, about 60 miles northwest of Santiago, the capital, raging through the hills of Viña del Mar and impacting the smaller nearby towns of Quilpué, Limache and Villa Alemana.
Several fires broke out Friday night, also threatening the port city of Valparaíso. The authorities only began to realize the extent of the damage on Saturday.
Chilean Interior Minister Carolina Tohá said Sunday that authorities hope that improving conditions – lower temperatures, higher humidity and less wind – will help firefighters tame hot spots and rescuers reach charred areas to remove the bodies.
By dawn Sunday, streaks of smoke clung to the hills above Viña del Mar. Along a highway to the coast, earthen embankments and bridges were scorched and tree stumps burned on slopes. The incinerated remains of cars littered the streets.
Early signs point to faulty evacuation orders, which some residents say may have contributed to the death count.
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Chile’s national disaster response service, Senapred, said alarms were sounded starting Friday and instructed people to evacuate, but did not order them to leave.
Regina Figueroa, 53, a resident of the Villa Independencia settlement outside Viña del Mar, said she received an alert on her cellphone with evacuation instructions Friday when the fire was already approaching her home.
“I got the alarm,” she said, “and I ran into the street. When I entered the street, the flames were already on the corner.”
Ms. Figueroa went to pick up her 5-year-old nephew, she said. The flames were so close that she could feel the heat as she ran. She stopped and dipped the boy, who was crying, into a pool to cool him off, she said, then she continued running up the stairs to escape.
“The sky was black,” he said. «You couldn’t see anything. “Everyone was yelling, shouting instructions, moaning in the wind.”
He reached the top of the stairs and stopped to catch his breath, sobbing.
“I couldn’t believe we were alive. But we were the lucky ones,” she said. “I lost my mother-in-law, my sister-in-law. “They died calcified in the street because they couldn’t escape the flames.”
Several blocks of Villa Independencia were decimated by the fire.
In El Olivar, Castro Vázquez said residents had fled to a local square when the cellphone alarm came through.
Black smoke rose up a hill from a botanical garden on the other side of the hill, he said, and within minutes their community was engulfed in tall orange flames.
Another resident, Andrés Calderón, 40, said several people in the neighborhood did not want to leave their homes, fearing thieves would rob them.
When he received the alert, Mr. Calderón said he jumped into his car and drove through smoke so thick that he said he had to turn on his headlights.
“It was like walking into hell,” Calderón said. “I couldn’t see, the wind was pushing the car almost off the road. “I kept driving.”
By Sunday, the area, which was a mix of decades-old public housing and makeshift homes, had been reduced to rubble. The sides of the road were covered in corrugated metal and piled up debris, everything blackened and smelling of smoke.
Mr. Castro Vázquez, a retired dock worker, said he had lost all his clothes, belongings, documents and part of his pension, which he had withdrawn and kept in cash.
Residents helped each other remove rubble and burnt appliances from the shells of their homes.
“I didn’t cry, I didn’t come to terms with it. I just focus on cleaning my house and my neighbor’s,” said Mr. Castro Vázquez. “We are devastated.”
In the hills around Viña del Mar, police and medical examiners began arriving Sunday afternoon. Police officers searched through the rubble, asking locals if they had seen any bodies.
Some survivors said they saw people engulfed in two-story flames. Others described seeing bodies cluttering the stairs.
Many residents in the settlements said they were left stranded without help or information as their cellphones had dead batteries and the power had failed. They said they were largely left on their own in responding to the disaster. Shelters set up for displaced people were too far away to be useful, many said.
In the Las Praderas neighborhood, some survivors huddled in the shade while others combed through the twisted remains of their homes. A taxi handed out bottled water and empanadas while a first-year medical student treated minor injuries.
The mayor of Viña del Mar, Macarena Ripamonti, declared in a press conference on Sunday morning that 372 people were missing in the municipality on Saturday night. She said officials would ensure the bodies of those who died in the fires were removed as quickly 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 experiencing the worst situation.”
Natalie Alcoba contributed a report from Buenos Aires.