Chilean firefighters have been on Saturday battling quickly increasing wildfires that officers worry have claimed round 10 lives and are threatening lots of of properties, prompting the president to declare a state of emergency.

About a dozen fires have been raging since Friday.

The blazes are concentrated within the Vina del Mar and Valparaiso vacationer areas, the place hundreds of hectares of forest have been ravaged, whereas coastal cities have been coated in a dense fog of grey smoke and compelled individuals to flee their properties.

“We have preliminary information that several people have died, around 10,” mentioned Sofia Gonzales Cortes, state consultant for the central area of Valparaiso.

In the cities of Estrella and Navidad, southwest of the capital, the fires have burned almost 30 properties, and compelled evacuations close to the browsing resort of Pichilemu.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” 63-year-old Yvonne Guzman advised AFP.

When the flames began to shut in on her dwelling in Quilpue, she fled along with her aged mom, solely to seek out themselves trapped in visitors for hours.

“It’s very distressing, because we’ve evacuated the house, but we can’t move forward. There are all these people trying to get out and who can’t move,” she mentioned.

On Friday, Chilean President Gabriel Boric decreed “a state of emergency due to catastrophe, in order to have all the necessary resources” to combat the fires.

“All forces are deployed in the fight against the forest fires,” he mentioned in a message posted on X.

Emergency providers have been set to fulfill on Saturday to evaluate the state of affairs.

Around 7,000 hectares have already been burned in Valparaiso alone, in keeping with CONAF, the Chilean nationwide forest authority, which known as the blazes “extreme”.

Images filmed by trapped motorists have gone viral on-line, displaying mountains in flames on the finish of the well-known “Route 68”, a highway utilized by hundreds of vacationers to get to the Pacific coast seashores.

On Friday, authorities closed the highway, which hyperlinks Valparaiso to the capital Santiago, as an enormous mushroom cloud of smoke “reduced visibility”.

The fires are being pushed by a summer season heatwave and drought affecting the southern half of South America brought on by the El Nino climate phenomenon, as scientists warn {that a} warming planet has elevated the chance of pure disasters corresponding to intense warmth and fires.

As Chile and Colombia battle rising temperatures, the heatwave can also be threatening to brush over Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil within the coming days.

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