A torrent of water, mud and rocks tore through Las Condes, a district at the foot of the Andes in eastern Santiago, on Thursday, sweeping away cars and a public transport bus after a week of record rainfall in Chile's capital. Authorities reported six injured and no deaths or missing people. President José Antonio Kast declared a disaster zone in the district, a measure that allows additional rescue teams and military equipment to be deployed.
Among the injured is a one-year-old child with a broken leg, according to Germán Codina, the presidential delegate for the Metropolitan Region. Firefighters said more than 1,000 people were rescued or assisted, and some 200 hectares were affected. Bus passengers had to climb onto the vehicle's roof to escape the water, and 11 residents were moved from a care home for older people. Mud also flooded two private clinics, covering treatment rooms and equipment, and reached the University of the Andes campus. Las Condes mayor Catalina San Martín said around 2,000 homes were damaged, 55 of them seriously enough to raise habitability concerns. She said some 14.4 centimetres of rain had fallen in recent days, about nine times the average for October.
The cause of the mudslide has been described in different ways. Police first pointed to an overflowing canal, while the national disaster prevention and response service cited the activation of ravines, mountain watercourses that are dry for most of the year. Codina later said an underground channel draining a ravine had become blocked. The agency said it sent no mobile phone evacuation alert because the event was sudden, and that its response would be reviewed once the emergency ends. Separately, the Mapocho River, which runs through Santiago, overflowed and prompted evacuation orders.
The agency declared a red alert in ten districts of the region, where schools were closed on Friday. Kast cancelled a ceremony to sign a reconstruction law in order to follow the emergency. Earlier storms this week had already damaged dozens of homes and left nearly 12,000 customers in Santiago without power. Officials were also investigating a death south of the capital, though no link to the flooding had been established. The rain was expected to ease on Friday.
The weather was driven by an atmospheric river, a long band of moisture, intensified by El Niño. The 52 millimetres that fell on Tuesday were the capital's highest daily October total in more than a century, and 74 millimetres over seven days make this the wettest October on record, ahead of 65 in 1987, according to specialists cited by the Chilean press.
El Niño is a natural warming of tropical Pacific waters that disrupts rainfall patterns worldwide and often brings wetter springs to the Southern Hemisphere. The World Meteorological Organization said on Thursday that this year's event is expected to peak in December and could be among the most intense since at least 1950. Chile has already been hit this year: a July storm left 13 dead and seven missing, mainly in the Valparaíso, La Araucanía and Biobío regions.