Search suspended for missing man after partial glacier collapse causes landslide that buries 90% of Swiss village
Geneva — The search for a 64-year-old man was suspended Thursday due to unsafe conditions after a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier crashed down a Swiss mountainside the day before.
The landslide sent plumes of dust skyward and coated with mud nearly all of an Alpine village that authorities had evacuated earlier this month as a precaution. State Councilor Stéphane Ganzer told Radio Télévision Suisse that 90% of the village was destroyed.
"An unbelievable amount of material thundered down into the valley," the Reuters news agency quoted Matthias Ebener, a spokesperson for local authorities, as saying.
"We've lost our village," Blatten Mayor Matthias Bellwald told a press conference, according to Reuters. "The village is under rubble. We will rebuild."
The Cantonal Police of Valais said a search and rescue operation was temporarily suspended Thursday afternoon because of falling debris.
The regional government said in a statement that a large chunk of the Birch Glacier above the village had broken off, causing the landslide, which also buried the nearby Lonza River bed, raising the possibility of dammed water flows.
"There is a serious risk of an ice jam that could flood the valley below," Antoine Jacquod, a military security official, told the Keystone-ATS news agency. "We're going to try to assess its dimensions today."
As a precaution, 16 people were evacuated late Wednesday from two villages located downstream from the disaster area.
"It's like a mountain, and of course, it creates a small lake that gets bigger and bigger," Raphael Mayoraz, the cantonal official in charge of natural hazard management, said Wednesday evening.
Video on social media and Swiss television showed that the mudslide near Blatten, in the southern Lötschental valley, partially submerged homes and other buildings under a mass of brownish sludge.
In recent days, authorities had ordered the evacuation of about 300 people, as well as all livestock, from the village amid fears that the 52 million-cubic-foot glacier was at risk of collapse.
The Valais cantonal government has meanwhile asked the army to provide clearing equipment and pumps to secure the riverbed.
"The deposit ... is not very stable, and debris flow is possible within the deposit itself (which) makes any intervention in the disaster area impossible for the time being," cantonal authorities said, adding there was risk on both sides of the valley.
Swiss glaciologists have repeatedly expressed concerns about a thaw in recent years — attributed in large part to global warming — that has accelerated the retreat of glaciers in Switzerland.
The landlocked Alpine country has the most glaciers of any country in Europe, and saw 4% of its total glacier volume disappear in 2023. That was the second-biggest decline in a single year after a 6% drop in 2022.
The incident comes just days after the bodies of five skiers were found on a glacier above the Swiss resort town of Zermatt.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.
