Rescue crews worked through the night in Las Condes, a wealthy district at the foot of the Andes on the eastern edge of Santiago, after a sudden flow of mud, rocks and logs poured down from a ravine on Thursday afternoon. Firefighters said they had rescued or evacuated more than 1,000 people. No deaths were reported, but at least six people were hurt, among them a 1-year-old child with broken bones.
Passengers clung to the roof of a bus
Footage recorded by residents showed dark water racing down General Blanche, one of the district’s main avenues. In one clip, several people held on to an open hatch on the roof of a red city bus as the current dragged it away. Chile’s disaster agency Senapred said 11 residents of a care home and the staff and patients of a university clinic were moved out, while 60 children took shelter in a technical school.
Nine times the usual October rain
Mayor Catalina San Martín said 14.4 centimeters of rain had fallen in recent days, roughly nine times the normal October total, leaving the hillsides “totally saturated.” Mauricio Lorca, head of the national geology and mining service Sernageomin, called it a “flash flow,” a flood that forms within minutes and drags large amounts of sediment with it. The Mapocho River, which crosses the capital, also burst its banks, prompting evacuation orders.
President José Antonio Kast declared Las Condes a disaster zone in order to “allocate all resources to address the emergency.” The army sent specialist vehicles, infantry troops and emergency teams to help with rescues and debris removal. A red alert remained in force for 10 districts of the capital region, where schools stayed shut on Friday.
The World Meteorological Organization said this year’s El Niño, which often brings wetter springs to the Southern Hemisphere, is expected to peak in December and could rank among the strongest since at least 1950.
Traffic cameras capture the torrent
Surveillance footage released by the Las Condes municipality shows the moment the flood reached the district’s streets: within seconds, a road busy with traffic turned into a torrent of mud that carried cars downhill and piled them against one another. Rainstorms earlier in the week had already damaged dozens of homes across central Chile and left nearly 12,000 customers in Santiago without power.
Watch: Las Condes municipal traffic cameras record the mudflow sweeping cars along a main road (Video: Las Condes Municipality)
