SANTIAGO – Some 3,000 people living in the towns of Palena and Futaleufu, in the southern Chilean region of Los Lagos, on Wednesday remained isolated because of a mudslide that buried the road leading to the area, authorities said.

The mudslide, about 120 meters (390 feet) long and 20 meters (65 feet) deep, occurred late Tuesday during a storm that affected the area, in the vicinity of Villa Santa Lucia, some 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) south of Santiago.

That is what Andres Ibaceta, the regional head of the National Emergency Management Office, or Onemi, told local media, adding that although the road link for the affected communities with the rest of Chile had been interrupted, the border pass to Argentina is open.

“You can’t get to Palena from the Chilean side, although it is possible from the Argentine side,” said Ibaceta, while the Highway Department said that the effort to clear the road could take between two and three days.

Ibaceta emphasized that the weather conditions had improved in recent hours, something that he said will enable work crews to accelerate the clearing of mud, rocks and other debris from the road.

The storm also resulted in power outages and the loss of telephone communications, a situation that authorities said they had resolved over the past few hours.

The front of bad weather that affected several regions of Chile over the past few days left two people dead and 3,542 with some sort of property damage, according to figures compiled by Onemi. EFE