Mudslide sweeps cars through Santiago's Las Condes, six injured and district declared disaster zone

A mudslide through a wealthy suburb

Heavy rains drenched Chile's capital and the surrounding region on Thursday, triggering mudslides that swept cars through the streets of Las Condes, a wealthy suburb east of Santiago. The flows flooded homes, forced residents to evacuate and injured at least six people, officials said. According to EL PAÍS, the water and mud started in the San Carlos de Apoquindo area and ran down the hill along Avenida Cristóbal Colón, flooding the emergency room of a Universidad Católica clinic. Citizen videos shared on social media showed cars and a public bus in the current, with passengers on the roof, France 24 reported. The Mapocho River, which runs through Santiago, overflowed and prompted evacuation orders.

Mayor Catalina San Martín said 14.4 centimeters (5.7 inches) of rain had fallen in recent days, about nine times the average October rainfall. The downpours were expected to ease on Friday, and classes in the district's schools were suspended for that day.

Emergency declaration and response

President José Antonio Kast declared a state of emergency for Las Condes, giving government agencies more power to respond as torrential rains turned key roads into impassable waterways. Europa Press described the decision as a state of catastrophe that frees all state resources for the crisis, following a meeting of the regional disaster risk committee. Army units and heavy machinery were deployed under the Interior, Public Works, Defense, Health and Energy ministries. Firefighters said they had rescued or evacuated more than 1,000 people, while Europa Press put the number evacuated from schools and health centers at more than 1,200.

Louis de Grange, the minister of Public Works, described the damage in the district.

The damage has been brutal, the number of cars destroyed, the houses completely flooded with mud. There are roads, there are streets in this sector that have more than a metre of mud.

Warnings and questions over alerts

Government spokesman Claudio Alvarado urged residents not to approach the affected areas and defended the decision not to trigger mobile emergency alerts. He said the mudslide developed 'from one minute to the next' and that an evacuation order without a clear perimeter would have caused 'much more confusion'. Mayor San Martín rejected criticism of poor maintenance, saying the municipality and the Public Works Ministry had recently cleaned the Quebrada Honda area and the underground tunnel after summer fires. Germán Codina, the presidential delegate for the Metropolitan Region, preliminarily pointed to the obstruction of two ducts as a possible origin of the torrent, and linked it to the loss of vegetation cover after the summer fire.

This rain was absolutely unexpected, we are coming off a very harsh winter with a lot of rain.

Wider storms and El Niño

Heavy rain and thunderstorms have affected the Metropolitan Region since Tuesday, according to DW. Earlier storms that week had damaged a few dozen homes across central Chile and left nearly 12,000 customers in Santiago without power, officials said. Meteorologists said Santiago recorded 74mm of rain in the first seven days of October, the rainiest October for the area in 76 years. In Talagante, police used helicopters to rescue residents trapped by the Mapocho's rising waters, and SIC Notícias reported at least 17 people rescued there. Officials said one person was found dead in a flooded underpass in San Bernardo, although the cause of death had not been confirmed. The World Meteorological Organization said this year's El Niño was expected to peak in December and could be among the most intense since at least 1950.