One person missing after glacier collapse buries Swiss village

UPI

3 days ago

The aftermath of a glacier collapse that sent millions of tons of ice, rock and mud careening down a Swiss mountainside Wednesday, burying the village of Blatten in the Canton of Valais in southwestern Switzerland. Photo by Christophe Bott/EPA-EFE
May 29 (UPI) -- Rescuers in the Swiss Alps were searching for at least one person missing after 1.5 million cubic meters of ice, rock and mud from an imploding glacier engulfed a village in the Lotschental Valley in the southwest of the country.
Authorities, including the military, were using drones and helicopters to access the area to search for casualties and assess the damage after a huge section of the Birch glacier, which sits atop Kleine Nesthorn above the village of Blatten at an altitude of between 8,350 and 11,000 feet, broke off Wednesday afternoon.
"An unbelievable amount of material thundered down into the valley," said Valais Canton spokesperson Matthias Ebener, who confirmed one person was unaccounted for but gave no further details.
The 300 inhabitants of the village, 35 miles north of Zermatt, were evacuated nine days earlier because of the threat posed by the Birch glacier, which geologists said had become unstable due to thawing.
"The unimaginable has happened," said Blatten Mayor Matthias Bellwald, vowing it was not the end for the village, which has been continuously inhabited since the 13th century.
"We have lost our village, but not our heart. We will support each other and console each other. After a long night, it will be morning again," said Bellwald.
The federal government in Bern pledged financial assistance to residents to enable them to remain living in the area, even if it is not possible to return to the village.
However, the head of the agency with responsibility for natural hazards in the Valais region, geologist Raphael Mayoraz, warned that other settlements nearby may need to be evacuated as well.
"We don't know yet what's left on top, but almost everything fell. It's the worst of the envisaged scenarios," he said.
Experts linked the collapse to warming temperatures caused by climate change, which is accelerating melting, not only of mountain glaciers, but also of critical permafrost in high mountain ranges.
In 2023, the village of Brienz, 35 miles away, was turned into a ghost town after its 3,100 residents were evacuated due to the danger from landslides caused by melting. Residents were eventually allowed to return but had to leave for a second time in November, after authorities warned it was unsafe to remain.
The BBC said the latest audit of the state of glaciers in Switzerland showed they could all disappear in less than 100 years unless global temperature rise is limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase above pre-industrial levels set by the Paris Climate agreement in 2015.