Santiago de Chile.– The Chilean government informed this Monday that two people died in the last hours and about 30,000 are isolated due to the storm that has affected various regions of central and southern Chile since the weekend.
The Undersecretary of the Interior, Manuel Monsalve, announced at a press conference that the deceased are a driver who fell on a tree on the timber route and a volunteer firefighter who lost his life on Sunday while trying to rescue an animal. in a river in the town of Cañete, Bíobio region, more than 550 kilometers south of the capital.
The number of isolated people, for its part, increased considerably in the last hours from 5,500 to almost 30,000 due to the cutting of a bridge in the Maule region, more than 250 kilometers south of Santiago
The increase, Monsalve explained, “is mainly due to the loss of connectivity at the 3 Arcos Bridge, in the province of Linares, which left just over 24,000 people isolated due to the impact of the bridge, which substantially modified the number of isolated people at the national level”.
According to the latest report from the Disaster Risk Management Committee (Cogrid), so far close to 19,000 people have been preventively evacuated, 169 homes have major damage and there are 25 areas with red alert due to overflow threat.
In addition, classes have been suspended in about twenty towns in the south-central area of the country.
“As of today, August 21, the rainfall will be concentrated between the O’Higgins and Bíobio regions, and we will have rainfall in Valparaíso and Metropolitana, which will be mainly concentrated on August 22,” Monsalve said.
This is the second episode of intense rainfall that the austral winter leaves in the south-central zone of the country after the one that occurred at the end of June, which left thousands of people affected.
