Every year there are a couple fires outside of Santiago, which further adds to the air contamination. Most of the time they are caused by arsonists, but supposedly there are some native plants out there that spontaneously combust.. which I think is sorta cool, but it is not so cool when there is a fire outside the city. It is chaparral landscape, natural forest fires happen. And when they do CONAF takes a crew out there, a rugged team used to running up desert terrain in complete gear. And the equipment used to fight fires does not seem anything like what is available in California. Nor have I ever seen helicopters used, little water... they just go up there and take care of it before it burns out of control.
Natural terrain... the spikey things in the middle are what they believe caused this fire on this ridiculously hot day in March
But it is NOT cool to be an arsonist.
Crews of people have to HIKE/ RUN up here. They are sorta like superheros.
And they do it in this gear.
