What remains: Disaster risk and emergency preparedness in a Chilean mining town

This qualitative study draws on a small-sample set of interviews with survivors, of the 1965 mining disaster in Chile, and family members to examine how past disaster experiences shape present-day understandings of disaster risk. On 28 March 1965, an earthquake triggered the collapse of a mine waste facility at the El Soldado copper mine in central Chile. The failure released a massive volume of tailings that destroyed the adjacent El Cobre settlement and caused significant loss of life. Most of the victims remain buried beneath the tailings. Despite the scale of the disaster, the mine resumed operations and continues to operate today. Survivors and their families, who carry the trauma of loss from 60 years earlier, now live downstream of the vastly expanded El Torito tailings facility.

Participants reported a strong awareness of natural and industrial hazards and described their own efforts to prepare for a future disaster. These behaviours were shaped by lived experience and communicative memory of the 1965 collapse. Participants described limited engagement with institutions and little change to the physical or social conditions that made the original disaster possible. Vulnerability persists because the same structural and spatial arrangements remain in place; that is, the underlying conditions of disaster at El Cobre have not been resolved but reproduced. Our study reveals some of the deeper patterns through which disaster becomes embedded in everyday life and sustained by distant institutions and large-scale industrial systems.