Emergency crews are working to clear mud, rocks and stranded vehicles from streets in Chile’s capital Friday after flash flooding swept through the affluent Las Condes neighborhood, damaging homes, hospitals and a university.
Machinery and emergency personnel were deployed across the area, where the mudslide carried away cars and a public-transit bus, injuring six people on Thursday afternoon. The government said its priority was to restore road connections and normal movement around the city while assessing damage to homes.
The episode highlights the challenges facing cities nestled against mountain ranges as increasingly volatile weather brings intense downpours and sudden flooding. Warmer conditions can turn mountain snow into rain, sending water rushing downhill and raising the risk of flash floods in cities below — as happened in Santiago, where much of the precipitation fell as rain high in the Andes at elevations where it usually snows.
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The flooding comes as an unusually intense El Niño develops in the Pacific, a weather pattern historically associated with wetter conditions in central Chile. Nearly 100 millimeters (about 4 inches) of rain accumulated during the week, Interior Minister Claudio Alvarado told reporters Friday. As much as 20 millimeters fell over roughly two hours Thursday, triggering the flooding in Las Condes.
The resulting surge in the foothills above Las Condes developed so quickly that authorities had no time to carry out preventive evacuations or issue cell phone emergency alerts, according to Alicia Cebrián, national director of disaster agency Senapred.
Las Condes Mayor Catalina San Martín said crews had been clearing a ravine in the mountains in the days before the disaster, but the scale of the landslide overwhelmed those efforts.
“The mountainside itself almost completely gave way,” she said Thursday night. Authorities pointed to a fire that burned about 1,000 hectares of vegetation in the area earlier this year, leaving the terrain more vulnerable to erosion.
President José Antonio Kast declared Las Condes a disaster zone Thursday evening. Several patients were evacuated from a medical facility, Alvarado said. There were no reports of missing people.
The mudslide occurred as part of a broader weather system that has affected a large swath of Chile for several days, from Coquimbo in the north to Los Lagos in the south, Cebrián said. Across the affected regions, authorities had recorded 75 homes with major damage and 2,285 with minor damage as of Friday morning. In Talagante, southwest of Santiago, about 600 households were evacuated Thursday.
In greater Santiago, schools were suspended Friday in 10 municipalities. Authorities asked people to avoid the worst-hit areas of Las Condes while crews worked to reopen roads.
Authorities remained on alert for further rainfall Friday afternoon, though any additional bursts were expected to be much more moderate than those that triggered Thursday’s flooding, Alvarado said. Another weather front is likely from Monday, bringing normal to moderate rainfall between Coquimbo and Biobío.