A man remained missing on Thursday following a massive landslide that engulfed a village in southern Switzerland.The Birch glacier in Switzerland’s southern Wallis region crumpled on Wednesday, with the resulting landslide of rock and ice sending plumes of dust skyward.The landslide coated nearly the entirety of an Alpine village with mud. Last week, authorities evacuated the village as a precaution. The barrage largely destroyed the hamlet of Blatten, which had been home to 300 people. State Councilor Stephane Ganzer told Radio Television Suisse that 90% of the village was destroyed.The Cantonal Police of Valais said a search and rescue operation was underway for the missing 64-year-old man, involving a drone with a thermal camera.Glaciers vulnerable to climate changeSwitzerland’s glaciers have been severely affected by climate change.In the years 2022 and 2023, they melted just as much as they had in the decades from 1960 through 1990.Matthias Huss, head of the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland, pointed to the likely influence of climate change in loosening the rock mass in the permafrost zone, which triggered the glacier collapse and the subsequent landslide.“Unexpected things happen at places that we have not seen for hundreds of years, most probably due to climate change,” he told Reuters.Concerns rising over blocked riverAuthorities have declared a state of emergency as they monitor the situation of the huge pile of glacier debris, stretching 2 kilometers (1.25 miles), blocking the Lonza River.“There is a serious risk of an ice jam that could flood the valley below,” Antoine Jacquod, a military security official, told the Keystone-ATS news agency. “We’re going to try to assess its dimensions.”With the area too unstable to be approached, authorities indicated that an assessment would be made during the late afternoon from the nearby village of Ferden.As a precaution, 16 people were evacuated late Wednesday from two villages downstream from the disaster area.An artificial dam has been emptied to receive the water pushed back by the wall of ice, earth and rubble. Were that water to overflow from the dam, authorities would need to consider evacuating the valley.“The deposit … is not very stable, and debris flow is possible within the deposit itself [which] makes any intervention in the disaster area impossible for the time being,” cantonal authorities said. They added that there is risk on both sides of the valley.Residents shocked by scale of destructionMartin Henzen, a Blatten resident, told Reuters that he was still trying to process what had occurred and did not want to speak for others in the village. “Most are calm,” Henzen said, “but they’re obviously affected.”Henzen said residents had been making preparations for some kind of natural disaster but “not for this scenario,” referring to the scale of destruction.Up to 1 million cubic meters (35 million cubic feet) of water could accumulate daily as a result of the debris damming up the river, and the buildings that emerged intact from the landslide are now flooding.Authorities have been airlifting livestock out of the area.“Right now,” said Jonas Jeitziner, an official in neighboring Wiler, “the shock is so profound that one can’t think about it yet.”
