On February 19, 2002 a hail storm came down on the city of La Paz. It caused such damage, both to individuals and infrastructure, that it was described as a crisis. The event was thus presented as an exceptional natural disaster. However, in retrospective, the analysis shows that the crisis was largely caused by a structural vulnerability, whose factors interacted with one another. Crisis managers learned certain lessons from this event; noneheles, their decisions didn’t truly reduce structural vulnerability.