Porker, my "few mm" was a reference to the Olaroz Chico forecast which indicated about 5mm expected at that time and which seems to have been borne out by dyeman's link. You are right though about the rainfall that washed out the Dakar - it was put at around 200mm in this article. Very heavy rain in anyone's language. Bear in mind, this is at a much lower altitude (around 2100m vs 4000m at Olaroz) and a considerable distance away. The green trees and hillsides in the photos suggest a very different climate from the desert conditions of the puna.
It is hard to say just how extreme an event you could reasonably expect at Olaroz. The NI43-101 report provides plenty of data on the climate at Olaroz in pages 24 to 30. Mean annual rainfall is put at 130 mm (p26) with most of the rain coming between November and March. I think your hypothetical event (more than double the annual rainfall in one dump) would be extremely unlikely.
If there was a heavy downpour, I don't think dilution in the ponds would be a showstopper - I can't calculate a dilution as I don't have any figure for the effective depth of the ponds. The photos in the gallery show some pretty high embankments - maybe 3m? A direct hit with a heavy downpour might dilute the lithium concentration a little but the process would go on - just with slightly reduced output while the concentration recovers.
My guess is that an extreme rainfall event is more likely to have impact on roads in to the area, affecting the workforce, supply of materials, shipments of product etc.
To put the rainfall figures in to some sort of perspective, the NI-43 101 has some discussion on the evaporation rates used in design (p138). The pilot plant ponds recorded 1733mm annual evaporation. The brine pan tests came in at 2600mm of evaporation. The ponds were designed with 1300mm evaporation rate. In the words of the report This is a reasonable base line in the context of brine activity factors that range from 75 – 80% depending on saturation levels, and industrial factors of 75% applied to small pond data to predict large pond evaporation rates. This also allows a generous margin to compensate for any unusually high rainfall event.
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