Three of my colleagues captured during the simulation in Noviciado, in june 2026.
Emergency simulation with Santiago’s fire department on June 14, 2026. Once again, we realized the extreme vulnerability of Rural Pudahuel.
Promoting our disaster preparedness classes alongside the team at a night fair in urban Pudahuel. I remember how cold it was that evening, while chilean cumbia played in the background.
By: Alexandre Fabien Gagné
At Santiago’s Dirección de Gestión de Riesgos y Desastres in Pudahuel, the geographers, usually anchored to their desks, were scrambling to alert the team and coordinate logistics. Others loaded the emergency response truck while a kayak sat parked in the building’s entrance.
Looking at the boat, my colleague turned to me with a smirk: “Oye Alex, ¿puedes nadar?” (“Hey Alex, are you able to swim?”)
Our boss, affectionately known to everyone as la jefa (“the boss”) was visibly stressed and seemingly everywhere at once. A major flood risk, exacerbated by an intense El Niño cycle (a phenomenon proper to Chile’s Pacific coast), was imminent. We geared up for a very long weekend.
It was July, the peak of the austral winter, and the torrential rain had just begun. Only a month prior, we had conducted a community flood simulation in Noviciado, a rural sector of Pudahuel where residents had already faced displacement in 2023 when the Mapocho River overflowed, submerging the local Escuela Elvira Santa Cruz Ossa.
That exercise laid bare the area’s acute vulnerabilities: people with disability had difficulty, finding the meeting point because of the lack of lightning in the streets, residents loose dogs posed safety risks during the scramble, several key roads proved impassable, and the designated assembly point was clearly inadequate.
Now, with heavy rain incoming, our simulation scenarios could become reality.
Yet the challenges we faced during the simulation highlighted that disasters are not inherently natural; while their triggers are environmental, their origins are human (Bavel et al., 2020).
First, severe outcomes stem primarily from planning failures and systemic neglect. The effects of disasters discriminate; nature does not. While natural hazards present a threat, social structures dictate the actual risk. In Pudahuel, structural poverty, informal housing, and systemic barriers for marginalized groups dramatically heighten vulnerability.
Second, disaster severity is compounded by climate change. That said, we must remember that today’s climate change is the result of human failure, driven largely by Global North states, to achieve a just social and ecological transition.
While events can be sudden, response efficiency is judged long before a crisis unfolds.
First, even disaster response is governed by law. Human rights and legal frameworks govern this space: international law guarantees a fundamental right to neutral, impartial assistance. In practice, however, implementation fails when policies remain gender blind or oblivious to accessibility needs.
Second, Bottom up responses often succeed where top down actions fail (Koirala, 2026). This participatory principle underpins international frameworks like the Sphere Standards, developed to empower local populations and address vulnerable groups’ needs in the context of humanitarian response.
Empirically, local training seems to pay off. Latin American field studies tend to demonstrate that conducting regular community simulations serves as a key protective factor against disaster impact (Medina Jil & Flores de Bishop, 2020; Sandoval-Díaz & al., 2023). In Pudahuel, building neighborhood led resilience is paramount because, in a sudden crisis, your neighbor, rather than the state, is the first responder. Conversely, as seen in centralized responses like those documented in the 2026 Venezuelan earthquakes’ response, authoritarian crisis management actively tends to erode the local networks essential for survival (Koirala, 2026).
As the rain intensified, colleagues stayed overnight at the office, ready to support rural Pudahuel. We were deeply grateful that no injuries were reported, yet the night captured what disaster risk management is truly about: hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.
Bibliography
Koirala, J. (2026). Venezuela Earthquake 2026: Desk Review of Existing Information [Working paper]. Cambridge Open Engage. https://doi.org/10.33774/coe-2026-g3zgf
Medina Jil, J. E., & Flores de Bishop, C. M. (2020). Conocimientos, actitudes y prácticas que determinan la capacidad de respuesta en desastres. Enfoque, 26(22), 40–49. https://doi.org/10.48204/j.enfoque.v26n22a4
Sandoval-Díaz, J., Navarrete Muñoz, M., & Cuadra Martínez, D. (2023). Revisión sistemática sobre la capacidad de adaptación y resiliencia comunitaria ante desastres socionaturales en América Latina y el Caribe. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos sobre Reducción del Riesgo de Desastres REDER, 7(2), 187–203. https://doi.org/10.55467/reder.v7i2.132
Van Bavel, B., Curtis, D. R., Dijkman, J., Hannaford, M., de Keyzer, M., van Onacker, E., & Soens, T. (2020). Effects of disasters. In Disasters and history: The vulnerability and resilience of past societies (pp. 123–158). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108569743.006