At least six people have died and three others have been injured after heavy rains caused a landslide in La Raquelito, a poor neighborhood in Naucalpan, according to the State of Mexico government. The landslide occurred at around 9:00 pm on Monday, when the water swept away the side of a hill that swept away a private house and a school, the Emiliano Zapata Elementary School.
The six victims were allegedly from the same family. They lived in a shack made of cardboard and sheet metal on the side of the mountain that could not withstand the landslide. Civil Protection has reported that among the dead are four men and two women, not yet officially identified, who were unable to escape from the precarious construction when the mud, water and rocks fell on them.
The residents of the colony were the first to come to the rescue with flashlights, followed later by the Civil Protection rescue teams, and they tried to get the family out from under the rubble. They were unsuccessful with six of them, who died in the collapse, but they did manage to rescue three other people who were admitted to the General Hospital of Naucalpan for medical attention.
Emergency teams are still working on the site until normality is restored, “supporting the residents of the La Raquelito neighborhood, after a hill collapsed as a result of the heavy rains recorded on the night of Monday, September 16,” the state government reported in a statement. The governor, Delfina Gómez, from Morena, has not publicly commented on the accident, but her administration’s information note states that she “instructed immediate attention in the area as well as the deployment of labor and machinery to support the affected families.”
Landslides are common in the State of Mexico at this time of year, when it rains almost every day. The water erodes the hills and causes land and rock movements that drag along whatever they find in their path. In itself, as a natural phenomenon, it is not a problem: measures can be taken to minimize risks. It is when these avalanches encounter houses built with poor materials and without professional supervision that they can become dangerous.
Experts interviewed by EL PAÍS for a report on the impact of the so-called natural disasters on poor populations in 2021 unanimously pointed to the lack of urban planning and risk prevention, the informality of the settlements and the poverty that prevails in them as some of the main reasons why landslides claim human lives.
Vicente Andrés Sandoval Henríquez, a researcher at the Disaster Research Unit of the Free University of Berlin, illustrated this with the case of earthquakes, another type of natural phenomenon that is also more severe in poor communities: “Earthquakes do not kill. What kills are buildings that collapse due to their poor quality, because they are poorly built or located in an area not suitable for construction.”
In the case of Naucalpan, the conditions of vulnerability that multiply the risks are met: high informality, entire neighborhoods built on hills not suitable for building, in irregular constructions made by their own inhabitants with recycled materials, lack of urban planning. Not only there, in other parts of the State of Mexico that share these characteristics, the same thing occurs.
In Ecatepec, the heavy rains have also left streets flooded with mud, cars buried, houses blocked, and a deployment of the Army, Civil Protection teams and civilians armed with shovels to try to clear the 80 affected homes. In Jilotzingo, another landslide on September 13 also left nine dead. In Chalco, residents have spent weeks with their houses submerged in black sewage water.
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