Residents struggled yesterday 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 yesterday 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 centimetres an hour from the blocked river and melting glacier ice, Stephane Ganzer, head of the security division for the Valais canton, told reporters.
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