Man missing after glacier in Switzerland collapses and destroys village
The landslide sent plumes of dust into the sky and coated with mud nearly all of an Alpine village that authorities had evacuated earlier this month as a precaution.
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State councilor Stephane Ganzer told Radio Television Suisse that 90% of the village was destroyed.
The Cantonal Police of Valais said that a search and rescue operation was under way for the man, whose name has not been made public, and it involved a drone with a thermal camera.
The avalanche one day after the collapse of the Birch Glacier (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP)
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.
Video on social media and Swiss television showed that the mudslide near Blatten, in the southern Lotschental valley, partially submerged homes and other buildings under a mass of sludge.
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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.
Swiss glaciologists have repeatedly expressed concerns about a thaw in recent years – attributed in large part to climate change – 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.
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In a small village in Switzerland's beautiful Loetschental valley, Matthias Bellwald walks down the main street and is greeted every few steps by locals who smile or offer a handshake or friendly Bellwald is a mayor, but this isn't his village. Two months ago his home, three miles away in Blatten, was wiped off the map when part of the mountain and glacier collapsed into the village's 300 residents had been evacuated days earlier, after geologists warned that the mountain was increasingly unstable. But they lost their homes, their church, their hotels and their Kalbermatten also lost the hotel that had been in his family for three generations."The feeling of the village, all the small alleys through the houses, the church, the memories you had when you played there as a child… all this is gone." Today, he is living in borrowed accommodation in the village of Wiler. 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