More than 50,000 people have been displaced by blazes burning for two days now in the Nuble and Biobio regions about 500km south of Santiago, fanned by strong winds and hot weather.
“We had to leave with the shirts on our back. If we had stayed another 20 minutes we would have burned to death,” Matias Cid, a 25-year-old student in the city of Penco, told AFP.
He described fast-moving flames burning through the night and devouring homes.
Video of the aftermath shows a bleak, empty cityscape of charred homes and burned-out pick-up trucks and cars.
Most of the fatalities from the wildfires in the region have so far been in Penco, Mayor Rodrigo Vera said.
President Gabriel Boric declared a state of emergency in Nuble and Biobio as nearly 4,000 firefighters battled the wildfires – raging during the high temperatures of the southern hemisphere summer. The order allows for the deployment of the armed forces to assist.
“All resources are available,” Boric wrote on X.
The president travelled to the badly impacted city of Concepcion to oversee the firefighting efforts.
“We have a confirmed number of 18 deaths today, but we are certain that this number will increase,” he said.
Alicia Cebrian, the director of the National Service for Disaster Prevention and Response, said most of the evacuations were in the Biobio towns of Penco and Lirquen, which have a combined population of around 60,000 people.
Lirquen, a small port town, was also hit hard, with many people saving themselves by rushing to the beach, said resident Alejandro Arredondo, 57.
“There is nothing left standing,” he said as he surveyed a burning landscape of metal and wood that used to be people’s homes.
The weather forecast Sunday was bad for firefighters – high temperatures and strong winds, said Esteban Krause, the head of a forest preservation agency in Biobio.
Wildfires have severely impacted south-central Chile in recent years amid growing signs of the impact of climate change in the South American country, including extreme weather, droughts and floods.
In February 2024, several fires broke out simultaneously near the city of Vina del Mar, northwest of Santiago, resulting in 138 deaths, according to the public prosecutor’s office.
About 16,000 people were affected by those fires, authorities said.