It took 20 minutes for decades of family memories to be reduced to smoke and ash. Claudia Matamala, 34, broke down in tears recounting how flames engulfed her parents’ home in the port town of Lirquén in central Chile, where she had been sheltering after her own house was destroyed by another wildfire just five weeks earlier.
Matamala had smelled smoke in the air in the early evening; within five hours, flames had reached the house. The pace of destruction was terrifying. The fire consumed the home before sweeping down the hill to devastate the next neighborhood. “It all happened in minutes,” Matamala said.
On January 16, a series of devastating wildfires broke out across central Chile’s Concepción province, destroying more than 1,750 homes in a matter of hours, according to remote sensing data shared with CNN by satellite companies ICEYE and Vantor.
At least 21 people died and more than 300 were injured, according to Chilean authorities, who said flames devoured more than 74,000 acres in two days. Within hours, the government declared a “state of catastrophe” and called in international assistance to fight the blazes.
Catastrophic wildfires are not new for Chile, but this year’s stand out for how fast the flames spread, devouring an average of nearly 25 acres every minute. “From a relatively controlled situation, we moved to a much wider front of fire in just a few hours,” Javier Fuchslocher, the provincial presidential delegate of the Biobío region where the fires were concentrated told AFP at the time.
Chile’s inferno was fueled by extreme heat, with temperatures pushing above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and abnormally dry conditions — but it was also driven by human changes to the landscape. Unchecked urban expansion has pushed homes to the fringes of fire-prone woodlands, and the industrial forests planted by Chile’s timber industry have turned hillsides into tinderboxes.
CNN spoke with survivors of the blaze, firefighters, and experts to understand how the fires spread so rapidly, and also analyzed flight and remote sensing data to map aerial firefighting operations. It paints a picture of swift-moving fires that torched whole neighborhoods and proved exceptionally hard to contain.
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What happened in Chile is not unique. As the climate crisis accelerates and urban populations boom, wildfires across the world are becoming larger, burning hotter, and harder to tackle, experts told CNN. The planet is entering a new era of fire, and it is not prepared.
First responders overwhelmed
Many of the survivors of January’s fires were shocked by the intensity and speed of the flames. They “really attacked many areas at the same time,” said Cristobal Rebolledo, a resident of Penco, a nearby city affected by the fires. “When (they) reached the first house on our street, we basically could only run out to try to save whatever we could.”
By the time the fires reached Concepción’s suburbs, in the early hours of January 18, they had surged over 35 times their footprint just hours earlier, according to CNN’s analysis of remote sensing data collected by NASA.
The intensity of the flames and the resulting smoke, compounded by the fact that the fire spread over the area mostly after dark, hampered the aerial firefighting strategy. Even with 37 aircraft — on top of ground resources — firefighters could not save large swaths of Penco and Lirquén, where Matamala and Rebolledo used to live. Entire neighborhoods were turned to ash.
CNN analyzed data from nearly 1,200 legs of firefighting flights across Concepción over two weeks when the fires peaked. They illustrate how waterbombers were unable to reach some of the most densely populated areas, such as Lirquén.
A firefighting pilot, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak with the media, said by the time flames reached Penco and Lirquén, “the visibility was extremely bad, and we were not able to fly there because we really didn’t see anything.” The pilot had feared the aircraft could collide with a cable, tower, or even another plane, making it impossible to fly safely.
CNN contacted the fire departments in Penco and Concepción as well as the National Forest Corporation, which manages teams of professional firefighters, but did not receive a response.
Wildfires burn hotter and flames are higher than they used to be, making them harder to fight, including from the air, said Maria Meza, a forest engineer at Colombia’s National Unit for Disaster Risk Management. “It’s not that we’re seeing more fires around the world, but the fires that do take place are becoming more intense,” she said.
“Sometimes we believe that we just send a plane and that saves the day, but these planes must operate under specific safety conditions, and these fires are now so intense you can’t even go near them,” she told CNN.
Urban planning gone wrong
The Concepción suburbs most affected by the blaze are a hot spot for loose building regulations and informal and rented housing, said Alvaro Hofflinger, a social vulnerability expert at Arizona State University who grew up in Chile. These communities are more vulnerable to catastrophic fires and natural disasters because buildings are packed together and the buffer zones to stop fires from spreading are fewer and smaller, Hofflinger said.
Most wildfires around the globe occur in zones known as the “Wildland-Urban Interface”: transitional areas between dense urban developments and wildlands. In Chile, cities like Penco and Lirquén have expanded significantly in recent decades, sprawling outward, with their fringes now just feet away from the wooded areas the fires tore through.
Experts like Hofflinger question whether local building standards are sufficient or thoroughly enforced enough to prevent fire risks. For example, building codes do not regulate the spacing of homes and the flammability of certain materials.
Data from the German Aerospace Center, which analyzes global development, cross-referenced with images from ICEYE and Vantor show that buildings making up the peripheries of the cities damaged by this year’s fires mostly sprang up in the 2000s and 2010s.
The home of Karen Quijada, a survivor from the Las Aranejas area of Concepción, was built two decades ago at the edge of the city and was bordered by thick forest. When the fire came, she and her family, mostly truck drivers working in the forest industry, barely escaped. “We have been living here for 23 years, and everything is burnt. Nothing was spared,” she told CNN.
Hillsides covered in fuel
The hills surrounding Concepción, Penco and Lirquén appear deep green from the air, carpeted in trees, and in the thickness of these forests lies an insidious risk.
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