An entire town has been consumed by flames in Chile as unusually hot, dry weather undermined efforts to combat the worst forest fires in the country’s recent history. “Nobody can imagine what happened in Santa Olga. What we have experienced here is literally like Dante’s Inferno,” said the Carlos Valenzuela, the mayor of the encompassing municipality Constitución. Now they’re not here,” Miguel Reyes, a resident of Santa Olga, told BioBioChileBut even with 5,000 firefighters, government resources have been overstretched. “About 42% of the forest fires are in plantation forests, which are like matchboxes,” said Mary Kalin Arroyo of the University of Chile.

Source: The Guardian January 26, 2017 22:25 UTC