Residents struggled on Thursday 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 climate change’s impact on the Alps.
A deluge of millions of cubic meters of ice, mud and rock crashed down a mountain on Wednesday, 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.
Rescue teams with search dogs and thermal drone scans have continued looking for a missing 64-year-old man but have found nothing. Local authorities suspended the search on Thursday afternoon, 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 centimeters an hour from the blocked river and melting glacier ice, Stephane Ganzer, head of the security division for the Valais canton, told reporters.
Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter is returning early from high-level talks in Ireland and will visit the site on Friday, her office said.
“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 neighboring 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.
A thin cloud of dust hung in the air over the Kleines Nesthorn Mountain where the rockslide occurred while a helicopter buzzed overhead.
Werner Bellwald, a 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 told Reuters. “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, Valais canton official 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 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 the impact of rising temperatures on 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.
Matthias Huss, head of Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland, pointed to the likely influence of climate change in loosening the rock mass among the permafrost, which triggered the collapse.
“Unexpected things happen at places that we have not seen for hundreds of years, most probably due to climate change,” he told Reuters.
This story was reported by Reuters. Reuters reporters Emma Farge in Geneva, Alison Williams, Gareth Jones, Mark Porter, and Philippa Fletcher contributed to this report.
