10 feared dead in Chile forest fires, emergency declared

SANTIAGO: Chilean firefighters were battling rapidly expanding wildfires Saturday that officials fear have claimed around 10 lives and are threatening hundreds of homes, prompting the president to declare a state of emergency. About a dozen fires have been raging since Friday.

The blazes are concentrated in the Vina del Mar and Valparaiso tourist regions, where they have ravaged thousands of hectares of forest, cloaked coastal cities in a dense fog of gray smoke and forced people to flee their homes. Authorities declared a curfew for Saturday morning in the two regions until noon (1500 GMT) to facilitate the movement of evacuees and emergency responders. "We have preliminary information that several people have died, around 10," said Sofia Gonzales Cortes, state representative for the central region of Valparaiso. In the towns of Estrella and Navidad, southwest of the capital, the fires have burned nearly 30 homes, and forced evacuations near the surfing resort of Pichilemu. "I´ve never seen anything like it," 63-year-old Yvonne Guzman told AFP. When the flames started to close in on her home in Quilpue, she fled with her elderly mother, only to find themselves trapped in traffic for hours. "It´s very distressing, because we´ve evacuated the house but we can´t move forward. There are all these people trying to get out and who can´t move," she said.