Rain in the Driest Desert on Earth

Why northern Chile is flooding in 2026, and what El Niño has to do with itNorthern Chile sits close to home for me. My family lives there now, even though I was born in the V region myself, so this is not a story I am watching from a comfortable distance. On the afternoon of 18 August 2026, about 30 millimetres of rain fell on Tocopilla, a port town of roughly 25 000 people in Chile’s Antofagasta region (II region). Tocopilla’s long term average is close to 5 millimetres a year. A cutoff low, a pocket of cold air that had pinched itself off from the main westerly flow over the Pacific, drew in enough moisture to dump something like six ordinary years of rain onto a town whose hillsides, drainage channels, and storm drains are built for a place that essentially never sees a storm at all [2]. The result was a mudflow through the streets, vehicles swept off roads, three neighbourhoods evacuated, one person killed by falling rock, three more missing, and a presidential declaration of a…