Chilean firefighters yesterday tried to contain a massive wildfire that has ravaged tens of thousands of acres of pristine Patagonia and forced authorities to close a popular national park.
High winds fanned the blaze at the Torres del Paine National Park, a 2,400km2 paradise of mountains, glaciers, natural forests and lakes in southern Chile visited by more than 100,000 people every year.
After meeting emergency officials struggling to get a grip on the inferno, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera announced that the park would remain shut for the whole of this month.
QUADRUPLED BLAZE
About 11,000 hectares of woodland and scrub, nearly 4 percent of the total area of the park, have already been destroyed by the blaze, which more than quadrupled in size in less than 24 hours.
The Chilean government has deployed four planes and a helicopter to the remote mountainous region, where 300 firefighters, soldiers and forest rangers are engaged in a desperate effort to get the inferno under control.
Aerial photographs showed a vast cloud of smoke obscuring the beautiful backdrop of snow-clad granite peaks, wild steppes and turquoise lakes.
“We are faced with a hugely complex situation, an extreme scenario, mainly due to topography, strong winds and highly combustible vegetation,” Chilean National Office of Emergency director Vicente Nunez said.
A crucial break was hoped for yesterday, when 10mm to 15mm of rain was expected.
The US Department of State earlier on Friday alerted US citizens in an advisory to the ongoing forest fires and urged them to avoid heading to the region.
evacuation
The blaze erupted late on Tuesday and advanced rapidly in dry conditions, forcing authorities to evacuate 700 people, mostly tourists, from the park, which is located about 3,000km south of Santiago.
Environmentalist group Accion Ecologica criticized what it said was the government’s slow response to the wildfire, drawing an unfavorable comparison with its rapid crackdown on students protesting education reforms.
“We would have liked to see a government as gifted at throwing water on the flames consuming our natural heritage as they are on citizens defending their rights,” activist Luis Mariano Rendon said.
A 2005 bush fire started by a Czech backpacker destroyed 160km2 of the Torres del Paine National Park, which was designated a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1978.
SEEKING HELP
Pinera pledged another 100 personnel would join crews yesterday and said his government would seek “all necessary assistance” from other countries, having already contacted Argentina, Australia and the US.
Neighboring Argentina, which has its own forests just across the border from Torres del Paine, has sent emergency teams to help.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the