Swiss glacier collapse: Person missing in landslide burying Blatten
One person is missing and 90 per cent of a village has been destroyed after a chunk of a glacier came crashing into a Swiss valley.
Dramatic drone video taken by the Swiss national broadcaster SRF showed an avalanche of ice, mud and rock completely covering part of the southwestern village of Blatten, the river running through it and the wooded sides of the surrounding Loetschental valley.
Officials said one person was missing, despite the village's 300 residents and livestock having been evacuated some days ago. Emergency services had urged people to stay away from the area that they warned was hazardous.
'The unimaginable has happened,' Matthias Bellwald, the mayor of Blatten, told a press conference after the slide. Appearing to fight back tears, he said: 'We've lost our village. The village is under rubble. We will rebuild.'
Stephane Ganzer, an official in the canton of Valais where Blatten is located, told Swiss media that the slide 'at first glance covered 90 per cent of the village'.
'There's a risk that the situation could get worse,' Ganzer told Canal9, citing a nearby river that may be blocked.
The landslide was caused by a large section of the Birch glacier that measured about 1.5 million cubic meters, located above the village, which had broken off.
Officials said millions of cubic metres of rock and soil had already fallen down since Blatten was first evacuated on March 19, when part of the mountain behind the glacier began to crumble.
Map of glacier collapse in Blatten
The president, Karin Keller-Sutter, said in a social media post: 'It's terrible to lose your home. In these hours, I feel for the residents of Blatten.'
The extent of the damage to Blatten had no precedent in the Swiss Alps in the current or previous century, according to Christian Huggel, a professor of environment and climate at the University of Zurich.
Huggel told Reuters it was widely known that local permafrost had been affected by changing temperatures in the Alps, which had warmed over the years due to climate change.
In 2017, eight hikers were killed and many homes destroyed when the biggest landslide in more than a hundred years came crashing down close to the southeastern village of Bondo.
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