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Emergency services in the particularly hard-hit coastal town of Viña del Mar

Photo: Javier Torres / AFP

According to the latest information, at least 99 people have died as a result of the devastating forest fires in Chile. This was announced by the SML authority responsible for registering the victims. President Gabriel Boric had previously spoken of 64 deaths during a visit to Quilpué, west of the particularly affected coastal town of Viña del Mar.

It was "the biggest tragedy" since the strong earthquake in 2010 that killed more than 500 people, said Boric during his visit to the Valparaíso region and warned that the number of deaths would rise significantly.

Entire residential areas were destroyed by the flames and cars burned, as a team from the AFP news agency reported. Thousands of residents were stuck for several hours on Friday as they tried to escape by car. Tens of thousands of hectares of forest were destroyed.

For the third day in a row, firefighters battled dozens of fires in the center and south of the country. According to the national civil protection service (Senapred), 34 fires were still blazing in the morning and 43 were therefore under control.

"That was an inferno"

"There's not a single house left here," said 67-year-old pensioner Lilian Rojas, who lived in the coastal town of Viña del Mar, which is popular with tourists, near the botanical gardens. The fire surprised them within a few minutes. »I went out to look and people were already running. I went out, closed the door and left," she says, pointing to her pink dress: "That's the only thing I have left."

"It was an inferno," said Rodrigo Pulgar, who lost his house in El Olivar, a district of Viña del Mar. He was still trying to help his neighbor when his own house suddenly caught fire. "It rained ash," he said.

Rosana Avendano, 63, was not at home when the fire broke out in El Olivar. "It was terrible, we lost everything," she told the AFP news agency. She feared for her husband's life for hours, but finally managed to reach him.

Viña del Mar is located in the tourist region of Valparaíso and is about an hour and a half drive from the capital Santiago de Chile. It is a popular vacation spot in the summer months. Mayor Macarena Ripamonti spoke of an “unprecedented catastrophe”. A crisis “of this magnitude has never occurred in the Valparaíso region,” she said.

Since Wednesday, temperatures have been around 40 degrees in the interior of the country and in the capital Santiago. According to experts, the heat is linked to the El Niño weather phenomenon, which is characterized by warming of surface water in the Pacific and has effects worldwide.

czl/AFP