AFP
Chileans who survived the flames of a forest fire scare will return
Maria Ines Hernandez described forest fires ravaging central Chile that have killed 24 people so far as hell on earth. its ashes.”It’s a miracle that some of the houses were saved,” Hernandez told AFP. “Now we fear the fire will return…. Where can we find refuge? Where? How?” Santa Juana is considered ground zero in the fires that have been burning for five days now. Ten of the deaths occurred in the town, five of them from one family. About 13,000 people live there, including in nearby farming estates nestled among the hills. Saturday. “Most of the houses were lost because we didn’t get any help. With air help we could have saved most of the houses, but this was not the case,” said Hernandez. Parts of Santa Juana appeared as disaster zones: buildings in smoldering ruins, vehicle shells baked into the scarred earth, all covered in a smoky, orange-tinted sky. the government, timber companies and private landowners on the other side.- ‘We die right here’ -Miguel Angel Henriquez, a 58-year-old farmer in Santa Juana, he and his wife argued for too long about whether to escape from the approaching flames and they are lucky to be alive.” We w to the end, but the fire cut us off on all sides,” he said. They went back in the direction they started and ran into firefighters, neighbors and police. “As the fire approached I said with them, ‘I either get out of here now or we die here.’ We hid behind the fire truck.” Henriquez remembers seeing a neighbor fighting the flames to try to rescue some of his animals. “He didn’t come out. I yelled at him to come out of the fire, but he wasn’t listening.” The town of Carmen Cuevas, 49, escaped all damage, so she went out in a pickup truck to distribute water and other relief supplies to neighbors who have been hit hard. “This hurts all of us. It’s a shame to see it all reduced to ashes,” she said. Other towns were also heavily damaged in the fires, such as Puren in the Araucania region. The stories of total loss come one after the other. A Mapuche man named Jose Ankalao said 70 percent of his village in an ancestral area called Wallmapu was destroyed, including land he inherited from his great-great-grandfather. “This is a huge tragedy. . He doesn’t know I wonder if people can understand what’s happening,” he tweeted.str-ps/pb/gm/dw/mlm