A catastrophic glacier collapse in the Swiss Alps may have destroyed the small village of Blatten on Wednesday, but the vast majority of its residents have emerged miraculously unharmed, authorities say.
As of Thursday morning, all but one of the residents of Blatten, a village in the Lötschental Valley, are safe after a 52,000 cubic foot Birch Glacier collapsed over the town, covering 90 percent of the area with mud and icefall.
But while the village itself was destroyed, there have been no confirmed deaths resulting from the collapse, as authorities, anticipating the crash, ordered all 300 villagers and their livestock to evacuate Blatten a week earlier.
However, one resident, a 64-year-old man, has not yet been found, and authorities are suspending the search to rescue him. While the Swiss Army was quickly deployed on Wednesday alongside rescue teams to search for the man, who they feared to was in the region hit by the collapse, police now say falling debris has made it impossible to continue.
“What I can tell you at the moment is that about 90 percent of the village is covered or destroyed, so it’s a major catastrophe that has happened here in Blatten,” Stephane Ganzer, head of security in the canton of Valais, said, according to the Associated Press.
While most of the village’s residents are safe, Blatten is not out of the woods yet. For one, authorities say the vast majority of homes were completely obliterated in the crash.
“We’ve lost our village,” said Blatten Mayor Matthias Bellwald in a press conference on Thursday. “The village is under rubble. We will rebuild.”
A resident of a neighboring hamlet told Reuters, “You can’t tell that there was ever a settlement there. Things happened there that no one here thought were possible.”
Officials also fear the situation could worsen because the collapse blocked off the Lonza River bed. As a result, a Swiss environmental researcher told Reuters, as many as one million cubic meters (about 264 million gallons) of water are accumulating behind the accidental dam each day, flooding the few buildings that remained intact after the initial crash.
The flooding has become so dire that livestock are now being airlifted out of the area, and neighboring villages, which were not impacted by the glacier collapse, have been evacuated as a precaution, reports Reuters.
In recent years, Swiss scientists have expressed concern that climate change is thawing permafrost on the region’s mountaintops, creating the risk of catastrophic collapses like this one when ice that has held rocks and debris in place for millennia thaws enough to let these materials slide down the mountains.
Shortly after the collapse, Swiss Environment Minister Albert Rösti committed to helping villagers who have lost their homes, calling the catastrophe an “extraordinary event.”
Meanwhile, Swiss President Kalin Keller-Sutter cut short a diplomatic visit to Ireland to return to her country after hearing news of the disaster.
