Why was the 2024 Las Tablas Fire in Chile so deadly? Common socioecological drivers of global wildfire disasters

In February 2024, the Las Tablas wildfire killed at least 135 people near the coastal city of Valparaíso, Chile, making it the deadliest wildfire disaster since the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia. Amid increased focus on global wildfire disasters, the economic impacts of wildfires often overshadow fatalities, presenting a gap in analysis and understanding of why some fires are more deadly than others. Here, we reconstruct the 2024 Las Tablas Fire and use a mixed methods approach to examine the factors contributing to the record fatalities. We further assess how this fire aligns with other recent global wildfire disasters that produced mass fatalities. The Las Tablas Fire occurred during a record heat wave and with an offshore wind, known locally as a puelche wind. Satellite data and burn severity patterns show it exhibited high rates of spread burning through highly flammable, non-native forests and complex topography in the wildland-urban interface. Most fatalities occurred in neighborhoods of informal, unregulated housing not connected to city services and home to some of the most vulnerable residents of the region. Both the biophysical and social factors present in the Las Tablas Fire are consistent with many recent fatal wildfire disasters globally, particularly in Mediterranean climates. These common denominators point to the potential for increasing frequency of fatal wildfire disasters with climate change, land use change, and social disparities. They also highlight the complexity of mitigating fatal wildfires.