ANDONG (AFP) — At least 24 people have been killed in one of South Korea’s worst wildfire outbreaks, with multiple raging blazes causing “unprecedented damage,” the acting president said Wednesday.

More than a dozen fires broke out over the weekend, scorching wide swathes of the southeast, forcing around 27,000 people to urgently evacuate, with the fire cutting off roads and downing communications lines as residents fled in panic.

Overnight into Wednesday, the death toll jumped to 19 as wind-driven flames tore through neighborhoods and razed an ancient temple.

Eighteen people were killed in the wildfires and a pilot in a firefighting helicopter died when his aircraft crashed in a mountain area, officials said. The death toll jumped to 24, a ministry of interior and safety official told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Wednesday.

According to the interior ministry, the wildfires have charred 17,398 hectares, with the blaze in Uiseong county alone accounting for 87 percent of the total.

The government has raised the crisis alert to its highest level and taken the rare step of transferring thousands of inmates out of prisons in the area.

“Wildfires burning for a fifth consecutive day... are causing unprecedented damage,” South Korea’s acting president Han Duck-soo said.

He told an emergency safety and disaster meeting that the blazes were “developing in a way that is exceeding both existing prediction models and earlier expectations.”

“Throughout the night, chaos continued as power and communication lines were cut in several areas and roads were blocked,” he added.

In the city of Andong, some evacuees sheltering in an elementary school gym told AFP they had to flee so quickly they could bring nothing with them.

Thousands of firefighters have been deployed, but “strong winds reaching speeds of 25 metres per second persisted from yesterday afternoon through the night, forcing the suspension of helicopter and drone operations,” acting president Han said.

By Wednesday, one of the fires was threatening historic Hahoe Folk Village — a UNESCO-listed world heritage site popular with tourists but now under an emergency alert.

Huge plumes of smoke turned the sky over the village grey, AFP reporters saw, with fire trucks and police cars lined up at the edges of the historic site.