Wildfires Rage Across Chile
At least 112 people are dead, hundreds more missing, and 1,600 left homeless after wildfires surged across central Chile this weekend. Firefighters were still struggling to contain blazes in the coastal Valparaiso region on Sunday, after high temperatures and strong winds spread the fires around the city of Viña del Mar, a popular tourist destination, and several smaller surrounding cities. A study published in January in Nature found that climate-fueled droughts and heatwaves, along with El Niño, are boosting the occurrence of wildfires in Chile. “It was more like a nuclear bomb than a fire,” 72-year-old Castro Vázquez, whose home in a suburb of Viña del Mar was destroyed, told the New York Times. “There’s nothing left.” (The Guardian, New York Times $, Al Jazeera, CBS, BBC, Reuters.)
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