Our topic was not about the flood in the high altitude salar lakes, however if you are asking about the flood threat to lithium production at the South American salt lakes, yes it's possible and it's already a threat and problem with the Uyuni salt lakes in Bolivia which has the largest lithium resource on earth. (See below)
Chili's Atacama salt lake where SQM and Albemarle operates is one of the driest region on earth. Atacama has nearly zero rainfall. It's about 1–10 mm. But these are quickly lost to evaporation due to high solar radiation and aridity.
The brine water extracted for producing lithium in all of these lakes is ancient water. It will never be replaced with the rainwater. Even the rivers are dried up, partly attributed to over 25 years of lithium brine extraction, suggesting that natural water inflows (from rain or groundwater) are insufficient to maintain surface water systems.
The largest salt lakes in Argentina where the major brine operation are; at Salar del Hombre Muerto, Salar de Olaroz and Salar de Cauchari. The rainfall is about 50–100 mm per year for these lakes.
The Uyuni salt lake in Bolivia typically receives 100–200 mm of rainfall per year, slightly higher than Argentinian salt lakes however there is a change in the climate there because the rainfall has been a problem for the lithium extraction, then gave up doing it by brine ponds. YLB - Yacimientos de Litio Boliviano – the state company responsible for the resource’s exploitation in Bolivia has admitted that they had rainfall problems at their ponds. They cancelled all job after investing $1b years ago. Now a Chinese consortium and a Russian company have got agreements to extract brine by DLE on June 2023 but not much work is done so far (Bolivian gov. got the 51% of all projects). Also the magnesium content is very high in the Uyuni lake which makes lithium extraction harder and costlier.
YLB officials also accepted that the rainfall had been a big problem for them on a presentation they have posted. You can see the X talks below about that as well.
The same problem might happen in the Argentinian salt lakes in the future due to the climate change. Nothing is guaranteed due to the nature's own act.
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