A vast section of a glacier broke apart in the Swiss Alps on Wednesday, setting off a landslide of ice, mud and rocks that caused widespread damage to a small village, nine days after its 300 residents had been ordered to evacuate.
At least one person is missing after the village, Blatten, in the Valais Canton in southern Switzerland, was buried beneath debris from the Birch Glacier, Matthias Ebener, a spokesman for the area’s crisis management team, said on Wednesday.
Drone footage and other videos captured the moment that the glacier collapsed sending a large plume of dust down a mountainside. The glacier, covered by about nine million tons of debris, was estimated by a government engineer to have been moving about eight to 11 feet a day toward the valley before the landslide.
Officials said at a news conference on Wednesday that it would take years to recover from the damage, which they were continuing to assess.
“We’ve lost the village, but not the heart,” Matthias Bellwald, the mayor of Blatten, said during the news conference.
Stéphane Ganzer, a state councilor for the Valais Canton, told SRF, the Swiss radio and television broadcasting corporation, on Wednesday that 90 percent of Blatten had been buried.
Karin Keller-Sutter, the Swiss president, sharing a photo of the destruction on social media on Wednesday, wrote that it was terrible to lose a home and that she was thinking of the people of Blatten.
Officials warned that the landslide, which registered as a 3.1-magnitude earthquake, could cause flooding in the area. A nearby riverbed is blocked by debris, which creates a significant risk of ice jams, the officials, who were not ruling out additional evacuations, said.
Regional leaders asked the army for pumps and debris removal equipment to try to prevent flooding, according to the State Council for Valais.
The main road connecting Blatten with the nearby village of Goppenstein was closed to all traffic, except for residents.
For about two weeks, the fractured glacier loomed precariously high above the picturesque hamlet, which sits in the Lötschental Valley.
Under the threat of a major landslide, dozens of livestock were evacuated last week, including about 52 cattle, as well as sheep and domestic rabbits. Images of an injured female cow being airlifted to safety by a helicopter drew widespread attention online.
Airlifting cattle is commonplace in the Alps when farmers are facing dire circumstances.
In 2023, the village of Brienz, Switzerland, narrowly averted a similar fate as Blatten’s when a portion of the mountain gave way and sent 50 million cubic feet of rock tumbling just shy of a schoolhouse. The village’s roughly 85 residents had been told to evacuate a few weeks earlier.
Last year, the threat of another landslide near Brienz, which is less than 60 miles northeast of Blatten, prompted officials again to order people to leave.
Melina Delkic contributed reporting.
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
The post Glacier Collapse in the Swiss Alps Destroys Most of a Village appeared first on New York Times.
