A volleyball match was underway. In La Gasca, a working-class neighborhood tucked against the western slopes of Pichincha volcano, neighbors had gathered on a concrete court on the afternoon of January 31, 2022. Above them, storms had been dumping rain on Quito for days. A catchment structure at El Tejado creek was reaching capacity. Around 5 pm, something failed. Water, mud, rocks, and pieces of trees came roaring down the slope. It hit the court, the spectators, the surrounding houses, and the cars parked along the street. By the next morning, residents were stringing white flags from balconies in La Gasca and La Comuna - a universal signal of families asking for help. Before the week was over, 28 people were dead and another 52 injured across the capital.
The immediate cause was meteorological. Seventy-five millimeters of rain fell on parts of Quito in a single afternoon - roughly three inches, in a city whose normal seasonal rains spread that much precipitation over weeks. Mayor Santiago Guaderas called it a record figure, the heaviest rainfall in the capital since 2003. Some estimates suggested forty times more rain fell than would have been expected in an average day of the wet season. Quito's topography amplified the danger. The city climbs the eastern flank of Pichincha, a 4,784-meter volcano, and the western neighborhoods are built on the steepest slopes. The soils were already saturated from days of earlier storms. When the final downpour hit, the engineers' description was clinical and correct: the soil on the slopes was oversaturated, which led to slips from the slopes into the river course, and that led to the landslide. What residents saw was something else - a wall of mud picking up everything it touched.
La Gasca and La Comuna suffered disproportionately. Both are neighborhoods that grew through informal settlement, built in the quebradas - the natural drainage ravines that cut Quito's western slopes. Many residents were Venezuelans who had resettled in the capital after fleeing economic collapse at home. Others were long-time Quitenos who had built in the quebradas because that was land they could afford. The mudflow followed the path of least resistance, which was also the path of the settlements. Entire homes were picked up and carried. Families lost relatives, possessions, and in many cases, the paperwork that proved they owned the land they had built on. In the days afterward, the International Rescue Committee noted that the disaster disproportionately affected Venezuelan families who had resettled in La Gasca over the preceding years, a population already vulnerable to displacement.
The immediate trigger was the overflow of a catchment structure on El Tejado creek. Quito has, for decades, culverted and channeled many of the quebradas that historically drained the mountainside, a process that allowed urban expansion but that also concentrated water flows at the exit points of each culvert. When one of those exits could not handle the volume, the pressure had to go somewhere. It went onto the volleyball court and through the neighborhood below. Agua de Quito, the city's water utility, worked in three 24-hour shifts for 84 hours straight to restore the catchment structure and remove the sediment that had accumulated upstream. In the political aftermath, the Minister of Safety convened reviews that acknowledged what urban planners had been saying for years: Quito had built over too many of its natural drainages, and the city's rainy-season geography no longer behaved the way official maps implied it did.
The Quito slide was the most visible event of a much larger storm system. Heavy rain had affected Ecuador since January 28, with the worst impacts spread across Guayas, Cotopaxi, El Oro, and Los Rios provinces. Neighboring Brazil was seeing similar disasters, with 24 dead in the same weather pattern. In late March, a separate landslide struck the road between Cuenca and Molleturo in Azuay Province, killing four more and destroying nine homes. The same day, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck Esmeraldas Province in the north, adding a seismic dimension to an already chaotic disaster response. Climate scientists linked the scale of the rainfall to changes in El Nino and La Nina patterns that were making extreme weather more common across South America.
One phrase kept returning in the post-disaster analysis: regional development balance. Most of Quito's dead and missing were from poor neighborhoods built against the mountain. For families with little income, those marginal areas were what was available. Wealthier Quitenos built on flatter, more stable ground, which meant that when the mountainside failed, the cost of that failure fell heavily on those least able to absorb it. The International Federation of the Red Cross launched a three-month emergency plan on February 9 that was later extended to six months. The International Rescue Committee worked with Ecuadorian authorities to support the displaced families. The rains of January 2022 are what people in Quito talk about when they want to remember how quickly a slope can fail - and how a volleyball match on an ordinary Monday afternoon can become the last thing a family ever did together.
Centered near La Gasca neighborhood in western Quito at approximately 0.18 degrees S, 78.47 degrees W. Quito sits at 2,850 meters elevation on the eastern flank of Pichincha Volcano (4,784 m). Nearest airport is Mariscal Sucre International Airport (SEQM/UIO), approximately 18 km east of the city in Tababela. The affected neighborhoods of La Gasca and La Comuna lie on steep western slopes above the city core. Weather is highly variable; the rainy season runs October to May. Afternoon thunderstorms are routine and occasionally severe. Valley fog common in the mornings.