Forest Fire on Chile’s Coast Kills At Least 64 and Leaves Hundreds Missing

Days after devastating wildfires ripped through Chile’s Pacific Coast, ravaging entire neighborhoods and trapping people fleeing in cars, officials said on Sunday that at least 112 people had been killed and hundreds remained missing and warned that the number of dead could rise sharply.

“That number is going to go up, we know it’s going to go up significantly,” President Gabriel Boric said earlier in the day, when 64 deaths had been confirmed. He described the fires in the Valparaíso region as the worst disaster in the country since a cataclysmic earthquake in 2010 left more than 400 people dead and displaced 1.5 million.

“We’re standing before a tragedy of immense proportions,” said the president, who visited the fire zone and announced that the nation would observe two days of mourning. He said a top priority was to recover the bodies of victims.

Thousands of homes were destroyed in the flames, which swept through the hilly settlements around the resort town of Viña del Mar starting Friday, propelled by high winds. A regional state of emergency was declared and a nighttime curfew imposed.

The fires erupted as many were on summer vacations in Viña del Mar, a city of roughly 330,000, and swept through the smaller neighboring cities of Quilpué, Limache, and Villa Alemana. In some hillside areas, many older residents were not able to escape.

Omar Castro Vázquez, whose home was destroyed in the settlement of El Olivar, said an older neighbor had died in the fire.