Rebuilding was never in question.
The melting glacier collapsed on a Wednesday in May, a cascade of boulders and ice and water burying recently evacuated homes and farms in the village of Blatten. It took half a minute. By the start of the next week, authorities were already drafting plans for a new village, in the same valley, with the threats of a warming world still lurking in the Alps all around.
Blatten was home to 300 people before disaster struck; some families had been there for hundreds of years. The authorities do not know where exactly the new town will sit. But they have estimated it will cost Swiss taxpayers more than $100 million to build. Insurance payouts from the disaster are expected to add another $400 million for reconstruction.
It is a high-altitude example of the financial and emotional damage that Europe is suffering as the climate changes.
Months after the catastrophe, residents and authorities in the Lötschental Valley are still plagued by questions. How aggressively can their government clear red tape to build new homes? How many residents will rebuild their lives in the new Blatten? And how will they navigate the dangers posed by the glacier that lies on the ruins of the village like a dying dragon, still melting, still moving, still muddying the question of where in the valley is safe?
What local leaders — and every resident I spoke with on a recent trip to the valley — are not asking is whether the villagers should move out of the mountains. That would be an existential question, for Swiss identity and for settlement across the Alps.
The post The Alps Are Melting, but the Villagers Will Not Be Moved appeared first on New York Times.
