Chile: Floods Kill 6 In World's Driest Desert, Shut Down Ops For World's Largest Copper Producer

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The world’s driest desert is flooding and some of the planet’s wettest woodlands are burning. Welcome to summer in Chile. Rains high up in the Andes mountains have led to torrents of water pouring into the Atacama desert below, sweeping away houses and roads. Meanwhile in the south, blistering temperatures have fueled forest fires, leading the government to declare some regions a disaster area.

President Sebastian Piñera declared a “zone of emergency” in northern Chile on Friday after heavy rains devastated the country’s El Loa province. Flooding caused six deaths and destroyed nearly 100 homes, the National Emergency Office said Saturday. Alerts for heavy precipitation were in effect in Arica, Parinacota and Tarapaca.

The disasters are part of a pattern of increasingly extreme weather in the country that stretches for 4,270 kilometers (2,650 miles) along South America’s south-west coast. The capital, Santiago, hasn’t received its average annual rainfall in a decade, while temperatures in the city beat the previous record by a whole degree Celsius last month. It was the third time in three years the city has set a record high.

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Chilean state-owned copper miner Codelco stopped work at its Chuquicamata and Ministro Hales mines on Thursday night, while Freeport-McMoRan Inc.’s El Abra mine has been halted since Monday, the companies said in emailed statements. The three mines are near the city of Calama in the country’s north. “This masks a larger problem because the storm has also impacted southern Peru, with an emergency declared in some areas,” Cesar Perez-Novoa, an analyst at BTG Pactual in Santiago, said by phone. “It is still too early to quantify the impact of these stoppages.”

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-08/codelco-halts-northern-chile-mines-amid-heavy-rain-tercera