An avalanche of ice, rocks and mud buried on Wednesday practically the entire town of Blatten, in the Swiss canton of Valais, after the collapse of the Birch glacier, leaving 300 homeless people and a missing.
The sliding, of a devastating violence, devastated 90% of the town center and implied the detachment of about 3.5 million cubic meters of material that descended the hillside at a great speed, also blocking the course of the Lonza River, according to information transmitted from the place by the public television Switzerland RTS.
A series of images captured with drones show a gray mantle where houses, roads and meadows were used.
The glacier had begun to fall in the middle of the month a number of rocks that were increasing as the days passed, which led to a rapid evaluation of the situation and to issue an evacuation order of the 300 inhabitants of the town, after confirming the great instability of the land.
“We knew it was a matter of time. The slope was saturated with thaw water and the glacier acted as an unstable wedge between the rock and the void. It was a natural disaster, but not a surprise,” one of the experts who supervised the glacier, Kamal Weiss told Swiss media.
The economic impact is considerable for the destruction of local infrastructure and because the lonza river blockade raises new flood risks in the next few days, authorities have pointed out.
For their part, several experts have commented that the case of Blatten is another alert on the consequences of climate change in mountain regions, where areas considered safe above could become unstable in the coming years.
With EFE information.
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