Sharjah24 - AFP: Maria Ines Hernandez called the central Chilean forest fires, which have claimed the lives of 24 people so far, "hell on Earth."
The 55-year-old social worker in the town of Santa Juana in the hard-hit Bobio farming region said many houses in the area were reduced to ashes.
"It is a miracle that some of the houses were spared," Hernandez said. "Now we are afraid that the fire will return.... Where will 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 fatalities happened in the town, five of them from just one family.
It is home to about 13,000 people, including in adjacent farming estates set amid rolling hills.
"It is rough land, with difficult access," mayor Ana Albornoz said Saturday.
"Most of the homes were lost because we got no help. With help from the air 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, shells of vehicles baked into the scarred earth, all enveloped in a smokey, orange-tinted sky.
Some of the areas burned in these fires are poor and isolated, and beset with violent clashes between Mapuche Indigenous people on one hand and the government, timber companies and private land owners on the other.
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