At least 13 people were reported dead as of Friday night as a result of the more than 150 wildfires burning across Chile that have destroyed homes and thousands of hectares of forest while the South American country is in the midst of a scorching heat wave.
Four of the deaths involved two separate vehicles in the Biobio region, about 560km south of the capital, Santiago.
“In one case they were burned because they were hit by the fire,” Minister of the Interior and Public Security Carolina Toha said.
Photo: Reuters
In the other case, she said, the victims died in a crash, “probably trying to escape the fire.”
The fifth victim was a firefighter who was run over by a fire truck while fighting a blaze in the area.
Later in the afternoon, a helicopter that was helping combat the flames crashed in the Araucania region, killing the pilot, a Bolivian national, and a mechanic, who was Chilean.
At nightfall, the national agency responsible for emergencies raised the death toll to 13 without giving details on the latest deaths.
As of midday on Friday, 151 wildfires were burning throughout Chile, including 65 declared under control. The fires had blazed through more than 14,000 hectares.
Most of the wildfires are in Biobio and neighboring Nuble, where the government has declared states of catastrophe that allow greater coordination with the military and the suspension of certain constitutional rights.
The heat wave hitting Chile is set to continue with high temperatures and strong winds that could make the wildfires more challenging.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric on Friday suspended his vacation to travel to the affected areas and said there is “evidence” that some of the wildfires were sparked by unauthorized burnings.
“The full force of the state will be deployed to, first of all, fight the fires and to accompany all the victims,” Boric said.
It remained unclear how many houses and other structures had been destroyed.
“Families are having a very difficult time,” Ivonne Rivas, the mayor of Tome in Biobio, told local radio. “It’s hell what they are living through, the fire got away from us.”
The wildfires caused the suspension of a highly anticipated announcement by forensic experts who were expected to give the cause of death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, winner of a Nobel Prize for literature.
The experts were set to give their view on whether Neruda died of complications from prostate cancer or whether he was poisoned, potentially settling one of the great mysteries of post-coup Chile.
The doctor in charge of delivering the report’s findings was unable to connect to the Internet, because he is in a region affected by the wildfires, a spokesman for the country’s judiciary said.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘UNWAVERING ALLIANCE’: The US Department of State said that China’s actions during military drills with Russia were not conducive to regional peace and stability The US on Tuesday criticized China over alleged radar deployments against Japanese military aircraft during a training exercise last week, while Tokyo and Seoul yesterday scrambled jets after Chinese and Russian military aircraft conducted joint patrols near the two countries. The incidents came after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi triggered a dispute with Beijing last month with her remarks on how Tokyo might react to a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan. “China’s actions are not conducive to regional peace and stability,” a US Department of State spokesperson said late on Tuesday, referring to the radar incident. “The US-Japan alliance is stronger and more
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS