Glacier Collapse Buries Swiss Village, One Person Missing

Drone images showed the devastation, as thick mud and debris covered the entire village, its surrounding valley walls and the river that ran through it. “We have lost our village,” Mayor Matthias Bellwald said at a news conference. The village is under rubble. We will rebuild.”

Authorities Assert Widespread Destruction
Some 90% of Blatten was buried by a landslide, local official Stephane Ganzer said. An “unbelievable amount of material dissolved” into the valley, describing a massive landslide in German, said Matthias Ebener, an official in the canton of Valais where the village is located.

Blatten’s 300 residents were evacuated on May 19 when geologists warned that failure seemed imminent - because of the instability of the mountain and glacier above. Millions of cubic metres of rock and soil have since lain crashed down. A video circulated widely online showed the instant of the glacier’s partial collapse, with an enormous cloud of dust and debris racing toward the village.

Experts Blame Climate Change as a Factor
Although the tumbling mountainside directly caused the catastrophe, warmer temperatures appeared to have had an effect, too, perhaps weakening the permafrost and stability of mountains, as Christian Huggel, a climate expert at the University of Zurich, said in an email. “That is not known from anywhere in the Swiss Alps in at least two centuries,” he added.

Images from the aftermath depicted broken wooden homes covered by debris from the landslide. Officials closed down the main road into the Loetschental valley and warned the general public to stay clear of the dangerous area. Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter expressed her solidarity with the region following the tragedy.