In Argentina, the situation in a sparsely populated district of Patagonia had been devastated by wildfires, and authorities in the south had evacuated some 3,000 tourists, officials said on 7th January.

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest have been burned in one of the areas of Argentina since Monday, which is still reeling a year later after its worst wildfires in three decades.

Hundreds of firefighters were aided by the assistance of helicopters and six water bombing planes to ensure the flames were fanned by high temperatures, strong winds, and severe drought conditions.

North of the lake Epuyen, in Chubut Province, more than “3,000 tourists were evacuated” out of the Puerto Patriada lake resort, together with several dozen permanent residents, Chubut Province Governor Ignacio Torres said on Wednesday.

He made no indication of the origin of the visitors.

The fires began on Monday in the Andes around the village of around 50 permanent residents. It spread fast within several hours because of dry weather conditions and strong winds.

“It is moving at giant strides,” said Belen Moreno, a dress designer aged 39 years and who lives with her family a few kilometres out of Puerto Patriada.

It is during this period of time that fires in the area have been occurring over the past several years, as Moreno explains, “around this time of year, the moment we see smoke in the sky, we all begin paying attention.”

Torres mentioned that at least one of the fires was arson. The governor vowed to send those who began the fire to jail, and offered a 50 million pesos (estimated US $ 33,000) reward to anyone providing information on the perpetrators.

Prosecutor Carlos Diaz Mayer said that the fire was ignited using an accelerant or petrol, and “this means that somebody lit the fire.”

Other than Chubut, the Agencia Federal de Emergencias reports fire raging in the provinces of Neuquen, Santa Cruz, and Rio Negro and southern Buenos Aires Province

The agency reports that over 500 hectares of landscape are experiencing active outbreaks, with another 3,000 hectares to be given as contained fires.

The National Fire Management Service has declared a red alert in eight provinces in the centre and south of the country.

In January and February of last year, which is the peak month of the Southern Hemisphere summer, nearly 32,000 hectares (twice the size of Brussels) were burned in the Argentine Patagonia.

“Such fires, of immense scale and the most devastating in the region in the past thirty years, were the biggest since,” according to Hernan Giardini, “the coordinator of the Forest Programme at Greenpeace Argentina, the fire had burned four times more area than the previous season.”

Giardini alleged that the efforts of firefighting had been compromised by cutbacks by the President Javier Mielo government at the Administracion de Parques Nacionales, which controls 30 percent of all the forests in the Patagonian Andes.

The activist gave an example of its fire brigade, which is only 400 as opposed to 700 to take care of the almost five million hectares under its jurisdiction and assist the provinces when it is called upon.