MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

A mudslide sweeps away cars and a bus in Santiago after the wettest October on record

Las Condes mayor Catalina San Martín put the number of homes with some damage at around 2,000, 55 of them with serious habitability problems

A torrent of water, mud and rocks swept away cars and a public transport bus on Thursday in San Carlos de Apoquindo, in the Las Condes district at the foot of the Andes in eastern Santiago, Chile, after a week of record rainfall. The official toll is six injured, with no deaths or missing, and President José Antonio Kast has declared a disaster zone in the district.

Among the injured is a one-year-old child with a broken leg, according to the presidential delegate for the Metropolitan Region, Germán Codina. More than a thousand people were rescued or assisted and some 200 hectares were affected. Las Condes mayor Catalina San Martín put the number of homes with some damage at around 2,000, 55 of them with serious habitability problems. Water and mud also entered two clinics and the University of the Andes campus.

Momento en comenzó el aluvión en Las Condes. https://t.co/he8miokwcv

— Vision País Chile (@visionpaischile) October 8, 2026

Authorities gave successive explanations of the cause. Police initially pointed to an overflowing canal; the national disaster prevention and response service, to the activation of ravines, mountain watercourses that are dry most of the year. Codina later attributed the emergency to the blockage of an underground channel that drains a ravine. The emergency service said it did not send an evacuation alert to mobile phones because it was “a sudden event”, and said its response would be assessed once the emergency was over.

The agency declared a red alert in ten districts of the region, where schools were closed on Friday, and Kast cancelled a ceremony to sign the reconstruction law in order to follow the emergency.

The mudslide capped a week of record-breaking weather driven by an atmospheric river intensified by El Niño. The 52 millimetres that fell on Tuesday 6 were the capital’s highest daily October total in more than a century, and the 74 millimetres accumulated in seven days make this the wettest October on record, ahead of 65 in 1987, according to specialists cited by the Chilean press.

Chile had already suffered a storm in July that left 13 dead and 7 missing, mainly in the Valparaíso, La Araucanía and Biobío regions.