Chile declares Las Condes a disaster zone after a mudslide
Mud came down from the foothills of Santiago and left six people injured. The government explains why it sent no mass alert to phones.
A mudslide came down from the Andean foothills on Thursday, Oct. 8, into the San Carlos de Apoquindo area. It lies in Las Condes, a district in eastern Santiago, Chile's capital. President José Antonio Kast said he had ordered a disaster-zone decree for the district, according to his post on X cited by La República.
Water and mud swept away cars and buses, flooded homes and reached the area's UC clinic, the Air Force hospital and the Universidad de los Andes. Rain had been falling for days from a frontal system over central Chile.
Six people are injured, one of them a one-year-old with a fracture, and no deaths or missing people have been reported so far. Firefighters rescued or evacuated more than a thousand people, according to Euronews. Ten districts suspended classes on Friday.
Two counts of damaged homes
The damage figures do not match. Presidential delegate Germán Codina spoke of about 1 960 affected homes and 55 with serious habitability problems. The national disaster agency, Senapred, counted 75 homes with major damage and 2 285 with minor damage, plus 118 people who lost their homes and 147 in shelters, all preliminary, according to La Tercera.
The alert that was not sent
Senapred had declared a Red Alert for Las Condes and nine other districts of the Santiago region at 18:20 on Thursday. It did not send a mass cell phone message, the SAE system. Its director, Alicia Cebrián, said that system supports evacuations already ordered and that the event was too sudden to justify using it, according to BioBioChile. She said there was "no time to anticipate" something like this.
Interior Minister Claudio Alvarado attributed the event to rain that built up over a short time and said there are no open complaints over alleged negligence. Undersecretary Máximo Pavez said the decree came faster than after July's storm, when Coquimbo and Huasco waited six days.
The cause has not been determined. Pablo Allard, a specialist at the Universidad del Desarrollo, pointed to a freezing level (the altitude where the temperature drops to 0 °C) higher than usual and to two blocked drainage channels. A city councilor cited a fire from months earlier. These are preliminary hypotheses, with no technical ruling. The official count of damaged homes and what preventive works existed in the ravines remain to be confirmed.
