Country faces more than 5,000 fires, with yellow smoke reaching the capital as neighbouring Brazil and Argentina face blazes
Devastating wildfires have broken out across across Paraguay, as drought and record high temperatures continue to exacerbate blazes across South America.
A total of 5,231 individual wildfires broke out across the country on 1 October - up 3,000 on the previous day. Most of were concentrated in the arid Chaco region in the west of the country, but thick yellow smoke had reached as far as the capital, Asunción.
Paraguay's outbreak came as the southern hemisphere heads into summer and neighbouring countries also face unprecedented wildfires. The Brazilian Amazon is recording its worst blazes in a decade, with numbers up 61% on the widely reported fires of last year, and separate fires in the southern Pantanal region.
Argentina has also seen record numbers of fires devastate the wetlands along the Paraná River, with multiple areas of the country continuing to experience aggressive blazes.
Guillermo Achucarro, climate policy researcher at Base-IS research centre in Asunción, said weather conditions were accelerating Paraguay's wildfires.
One of the country's worst droughts of recent decades has seen the River Paraguay - one of its main waterways - drop to 50-year lows. Meanwhile, the country is going through a heatwave, registering a record high temperature of 45.5C (113.9F) last Saturday.
"The same thing happens every year, and every year it's as if it were a surprise," he said.
Paraguay's volunteer fire service is struggling to deal with the number of fires and lacks funds and equipment. In many cases, such as an enormous fire at Asunción's main landfill, it has relied on donations from citizens.
As a wildfire raged just metres from the poor neighbourhood of Banco San Miguel in Asunción, locals said official help couldn't come soon enough.
A woman who gave her name as Yanina watched wide-eyed as the flames and smoke moved nearer to her precariously built home. "My bathroom is about to catch on fire and the firefighters are out of water," she said.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect...
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
- Michael Crichton
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