In South America winter is coming to an end, and in some parts with great relief because of its “unusual” harshness.
The Peru Reports site here wrote that extreme cold killed 21 people, among them 15 children in Peru (emphasis added):
Peru’s government is rushing to provide relief in the southern state of Puno, where a harsh winter has killed 21 people.
After an avalanche buried six miners in San Antonio de Putina province last week, 15 children under five years old have since died from acute respiratory infections and pneumonia in an unusually harsh winter.”
Temperatures plummeted to -20°C and the effected region was hit heavy snow the report writes.
The winter was so severe that by mid July health officials had seen 39,000 cases of acute respiratory infections among citizens. But not only humans had to endure extreme suffering from the harsh winter, the Peru Reports also writes:
Over 171,000 alpacas have died from hypothermia, diarrhea, pneumonia and starvation. The animals feed on grass, which is frozen and covered in snow.
The German language Latina Presse here called the cold wave and the death a tragedy.
In 2013 Approximately 250,000 alpacas died “as a result of the worst snowfall” Peru had seen in a decade and the “unexpectedly intense blast of winter weather”. Read here.
In Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, temperatures were 8 or 9 degrees Celsius below average, Al Jazeera reported, adding that the Atacama Desert in Chile, often regarded as one of the driest places on Earth, saw the heaviest snowfall the region has seen in 30 years.”
For a supposedly overheated planet, we sure have been seeing lots of reports of “unusual cold” coming from all over the world.