Mudslide in Santiago, Chile sweeps away cars and a bus

Chile: Emergency crews are working to clear mud, rocks and stranded vehicles from streets in Chile’s capital, Santiago, after flash flooding swept through the affluent Las Condes neighbourhood, 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.

The flooding comes as an unusually intense El Nino develops in the Pacific, a weather pattern historically associated with wetter conditions in central Chile. Nearly 100 millimetres of rain accumulated during the week, Interior Minister Claudio Alvarado told reporters on Friday. As much as 20 millimetres fell over roughly two hours on 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 phone emergency alerts, according to Alicia Cebrian, national director of disaster agency Senapred.

Las Condes Mayor Catalina San Martin 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 on Thursday night. Authorities pointed to a fire that burnt about 1000 hectares of vegetation in the area earlier this year, leaving the terrain more vulnerable to erosion.

President Jose Antonio Kast declared Las Condes a disaster zone on 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, Cebrian said.

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