Dear all,
As most of you know the NOIRLab facilities including Rubin have been heavily impacted by the record breaking storm from last week. We evacuated the summit on July 14 and have not been back yet.
This is a major disaster for the region, and our priority has been to support our staff and community to ensure their safety and lend support where we can.
The NOIRLab team including folks from Rubin are actively planning for return to the summit, working on access through our damaged road as of yesterday. We are deliberately and safely making progress from the bottom of the road upward, and as you can imagine it will take time to get back to operations. We will keep you posted.
The following message was posted by NOIRLab on the NOIRLab and Rubin websites yesterday.
Chile has been impacted by an exceptionally powerful storm with heavy precipitation and widespread flooding affecting the communities where many of our colleagues live. NSF NOIRLab’s mountain facilities are currently closed and access roads have been severely damaged.
The safety and well-being of our staff and their families remains our highest priority as we assess conditions.
As a precaution, we evacuated all personnel from our observatories on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 15, prioritizing their safety. We safely secured our telescopes in a protective configuration and will return to the mountain as soon as conditions allow.