The director of the Center for Climate and Resilience Research (CR2), Roberto Rondanelli, recommended to President José Antonio Kast that the Meteorological Directorate of Chile move from Defense to the Ministry of the Interior, according to La Tercera. The proposal was raised at a meeting at La Moneda in July.
Rondanelli, an academic at the University of Chile, disclosed the meeting this Wednesday in an interview with TVN's 24 Horas. According to his account, the president and Undersecretary of the Interior Máximo Pavez attended the meeting.
The meeting took place after the frontal system that struck the Atacama and Coquimbo regions. That storm left 13 dead, 15 missing and 13,993 people affected, as well as more than 34 thousand damaged homes.
The academic returned to the issue after the events of Tuesday, October 13. That day, heavy rain with hail, a thunderstorm and a tornado in Estación Central prompted a red alert in the Metropolitan Region.
The Meteorological Directorate currently falls under the Directorate General of Civil Aeronautics (DGAC), an agency under the Air Force and the Ministry of Defense. For Rondanelli, that historical origin explains the service's fragility.
"The mandate is airport safety. That is a very narrow mandate for a Meteorological Directorate that now has to look at other kinds of issues, agricultural issues, risk prevention," he said in the interview.
The CR2 director added that the agency does not even have the status of a service headed by its own chief. As a result, he said, it lacks autonomy and does not necessarily control its own budget.
In his view, the country needs a "stronger" institution capable of providing better information to the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (Senapred). "It is far too low in our organizational chart for the challenges we face as a country," he warned.
La Tercera did not report whether the government responded to the recommendation. There is also no public information about a proposal to move the Meteorological Directorate to the Ministry of the Interior.
