Switzerland
Search paused in buried town
Residents are struggling to absorb the scale of devastation caused by a huge slab of glacier that buried most of their picturesque Swiss village, in what scientists suspect is a dramatic example of extreme weather's impact on the Alps.
A deluge of millions of cubic meters of ice, mud and rock crashed down a mountain, engulfing the village of Blatten and the few houses that remained were later flooded. Its 300 residents had already been evacuated earlier in May after part of the mountain behind the Birch Glacier began to crumble.
'The mountain was coming': Swiss residents in shock after glacier debris buries village. – Reuters
The landslide sent plumes of dust skyward and coated with mud nearly all of the alpine village. State Councilor Stéphane Ganzer told Radio Télévision Suisse that 90 per cent of the village was destroyed.
Video on social media and Swiss television showed that the mudslide in the southern Lötschental valley partially submerged homes and other buildings under a mass of brownish sludge.
Satellite imagery shows Swiss village before and after glacier collapse. – Reuters
Rescue teams with search dogs and thermal drone scans had been looking for a missing 64-year-old man but found nothing. Local authorities have suspended the search, saying the debris mounds were too unstable for now and warned of further rockfalls.
With the Swiss army closely monitoring the situation, flooding worsened during the day as vast mounds of debris almost two kilometers across clogged the path of the River Lonza, causing a huge lake to form amid the wreckage and raising fears that the morass could dislodge.
Water levels have been rising by 80 centimetres an hour from the blocked river and melting glacier ice, Ganzer told reporters.
Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter is returning early from high-level talks in Ireland and will visit the site, her office said.
She expressed her solidarity with the local population as emergency services warned people the area was hazardous and urged them to stay away, closing off the main road into the valley.
"It's terrible to lose your home," Keller-Sutter said on X.
"I don't want to talk just now. I lost everything yesterday. I hope you understand," said one middle-aged woman from Blatten, declining to give her name as she sat alone disconsolately in front of a church in the neighbouring village of Wiler.
Nearby, the road ran along the valley before ending abruptly at the mass of mud and debris now blanketing her own village.
The aftermath of the landslide. – AP
The debris carved a grey gash into the wooded mountainside, stripping it bare of trees and leaving channels of water seeping over the mass of rock and earth below. A thin cloud of dust hung in the air over the Kleines Nesthorn Mountain where the rockslide occurred while a helicopter buzzed overhead.
Martin Henzen, another Blatten resident, said he was still trying to process what had occurred and did not want to speak for others in the village, saying only:
"Most are calm, but they're obviously affected."
They had been making preparations for some kind of natural disaster but "not for this scenario", he added, referring to the scale of destruction.
Drone footage broadcast by Swiss national broadcaster SRF showed the rubble of shattered wooden buildings on the flanks of the huge mass.
"We've lost our village," Matthias Bellwald, the mayor of Blatten told a press conference after the slide.
"The village is under rubble. We will rebuild."
Werner Bellwald, a 65-year-old cultural studies expert, lost the wooden family house built in 1654 where he lived in Ried, a hamlet next to Blatten also wiped out by the deluge.
"You can't tell that there was ever a settlement there," he said. "Things happened there that no one here thought were possible."
Profound shock
The worst scenario would be that a wave of debris bursts the nearby Ferden Dam, Ganzer said. He added that the chances of this further mudslide were currently unlikely, noting that the dam had been emptied as a precaution so it could act as a buffer zone.
Local authorities said that the buildings in Blatten which had emerged intact from the landslide are now flooded and that some residents of nearby villages had been evacuated.
The large mudslide covers the mountain. – AP
The army said around 50 personnel as well as water pumps, diggers and other heavy equipment were on standby to provide relief when it was safe.
Authorities were airlifting livestock out of the area, said Jonas Jeitziner, a local official in Wiler, as a few sheep scrambled out of a container lowered from a helicopter.
Asked how he felt about the future, he said, gazing towards the plain of mud:
"Right now, the shock is so profound that one can't think about it yet."
The catastrophe has revived concern about Alpine permafrost where thawing has loosened some rock structures, creating new mountain hazards.
For years, the Birch Glacier has been creeping down the mountainside, pressured by shifting debris near the summit.
The landlocked Alpine country has the most glaciers of any country in Europe, and saw 4 per cent of its total glacier volume disappear in 2023. That was the second-biggest decline in a single year after a 6 per cent drop in 2022.
