“The unimaginable has arrived,” said Matthias Bellwald when he stepped in front of the press on Wednesday evening. “We lost the village.” Bellwald is the mayor of Blatten. This mountain village in the Valais Lötschental was largely destroyed by a clash. A huge avalanche of rubble and ice detached from the east flank of the more 3300 meter high Nesthorn, thundered into the valley and showered many houses and streets. The demolition had so much strength that he triggered an earthquake of the strength of 3.1 on the judge scale. Drone images on the Internet show the extent of the destruction. The brown mass of earth, rock and ice has lay down meter high over the village and buried a number of houses among themselves. In the part of the village, where the tongue of the scree avalanche was no longer sufficient, the buildings are unconditionally on green meadows. “Blaten is under a rubble cone,” the mayor stated visibly depressed. The geologists had seen the danger and therefore evacuated the village two weeks ago. Therefore, there were no dead and injured among the 300 inhabitants. However, a person is missing. “The worst-case scenario has arrived,” said Raphaël Mayoraz, cantonal head of the department for natural hazards in the press conference. Three million cubic meters of rubble were run down together with the birch glacier. The glacier lay below the Nesthorn and, heavily complained with rubble, had moved forward in the past few days. Nevertheless, the geologists hoped until the end that there would be only too many small and therefore less dangerous partial dropouts. “Together we are strong” Mayoraz assumes that the entire fragile material has now run down from the mountain. But you couldn’t be quite sure. One problem now is that the Lonza river is partially showered and therefore forms a lake that becomes larger and larger. This could result in a mural, i.e. a electricity of mud and coarser rock material. It has to be examined on Thursday whether this could endanger the rest of the valley. An evacuation of other villages in the valley was not excluded. Despite the catastrophe, the mayor of Blattener tried to spread confidence: everything possible would be done to rebuild the village. “Together we are strong,” said Bellwald. The mountain and the glacier could not come down a second time. Together they will start quickly with the re -repair of the village. “Nature is stronger than humans. The miners know that,” said Rösti. From this event of the worst possible expression, it was not expected. “That makes us stunned.” The army and disaster relief are already on the way to the Lötschental, said Pfister.Blatten is located on the northern side of the Rhone valley, above Visp. It is the back village in the Lötschental and is 1540 meters above sea level. The birch glacier and the little Nesthorn have been under observation for 30 years. Thanks to the cameras set up, the geologists recently discovered cracks in the rock. When they looked more closely, they found that the eastern flank was crumbling. The reason for this is still unclear. The demolition area lies in the permafrost zone, which begins to thaw because of climate change.
