Chile, affected by the weather: floods in the north and fires in the south

Araucania, CHILE. Chile fights forest fires that have destroyed thousands of hectares in the south of the country, but must simultaneously combat the damage caused by the floods that threaten the production of the largest copper deposits located in the north of the country .

With the southern regions of Biobío, La Araucanía and Los Ríos under the "Constitutional exception mechanism by disaster" – which allows to allocate economic resources and to deploy military personnel in the region – the brigadists foresters have focused this Friday on creating roads that prevent the advance of the flames.

"The numerical precedent we have is that over the past week, 13,000 hectares have been affected.In general, the situation has improved (but the situation does not improve), but we can not lose momentum "in the fight against fires, said Rodrigo Pino Riquelme, director of the operation deployed in the disaster zone.

The official highlighted the help received by the brigades of the National Forestry Society (Conaf) through aircraft, which dump large quantities of water in the middle of the igneous lights, thus facilitating the task of emergency teams deployed in large areas and dense afforestation.

In Galvarino, located about 670 kilometers from Santiago, in the region of La Araucanía, the fight against fires has since Friday been badisted by a powerful American aircraft that can launch 36,000 liters of water and equipped with high technology to define These are the most effective download points.

Flames travel through rural areas, destroying lands rich in ecosystem resources but still far from major cities.

Between January and February 2017,
Chile experienced a huge forest fire that hit the center-south of the country, killing 11 people, around 1,500 homes and nearly 500,000 hectares destroyed.

Pino Riquelme ruled out that the current fires are comparable to the situation two years ago, but stressed that "the complicated is now the simultaneity" homes requires extensive deployment in the field.

Floods in the north

While the green expanses of Patagonia are turned into ashes, the northern regions crossed by the Atacama Desert – the driest in the world – resist the heavy rains of the Altiplanic. The resulting floods have already left six people dead, a hundred homes destroyed and 140 others damaged. In addition, dozens of villages have been isolated by flooding gorges and roadblocks and are supplied with food and drinking water by air force planes.

President

Sebastián Piñera

announced on his Twitter account that he would suspend his vacation "given the difficult situation in the north of the country". The president announced that he would activate "an emergency plan so that the situation normalizes quickly and that the victims receive help".

Streams of copper water slipping into Calama's waterways forced Codelco, the world's largest copper producer, to "preemptively" suspend the activities of the giant mines of Chuquicamata and Minister Hales at the last minute of Thursday. the copper

Detention on the site of & # 39; Chuqui & # 39; – a giant open-pit mine producing about 300,000 tonnes of copper a year and pbading through underground operations – was enacted "to protect the integrity of the population," Codelco said.

At Calama, "until nine o'clock in the morning, he had fallen 12 millimeters, double the 5.9 millimeters expected for the year in the region," said Orlando AFP. Cortes, meteorologist at the Directorate of Meteorology of Chile.

In rain runoff, the characteristics of a "desert soil, so dry that it fails to absorb water generating time that it flows superficially", has added the specialist.

The summer rains, frequent at this time but with low intensity, affect the regions of the extreme north of Chile: Arica and Paranicota, Tarapacá, Antofagasta and Atacama, generating an increase and an overflow of the Loa River, the most long Chile which runs through much of the Atacama desert ..

The emergency would continue this weekend given the weather forecast that heralds continued rains until Sunday.

AP and AFP agencies