GENEVA — Switzerland’s president on Friday mentioned evacuees from an Alpine village whose properties and companies had been destroyed by a landslide brought on by a glacier collapse had been “not alone,” and the federal government was calculating methods to assist.
Karin Keller-Sutter spoke after a helicopter flight to see for herself the injury to the village of Blatten that was largely destroyed on Wednesday as an estimated 10 thousands and thousands of tons of mud, ice and rock thundered down from the Birch glacier overhead.
“The pressure with which the mountain right here worn out a complete village is indescribable,” Keller-Sutter mentioned. “I’d wish to inform you all that you simply’re not alone. The entire of Switzerland is with you, and never simply (folks) in Switzerland.”
Officers restricted entry to the world and warned that waters from the Lonza River, which has been dammed up by deposits stacked tens of meters excessive over a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) swath of valley, had pooled right into a lake. The long run course of these waters couldn’t but be predicted exactly.
“Sadly, the hazard has not but been averted,” Keller-Sutter mentioned.
Whereas the authorities weren’t in a position to stop the pure catastrophe, the nation has the “experience and monetary sources” to deal with such occasions, she added.
Blatten had been evacuated about 10 days earlier after specialists decided a rising menace from the loosening glacier. Nonetheless, a 64-year-old man stays lacking and authorities have known as off a search for him.
Stephane Ganzer, an elected official who runs safety within the Valais, mentioned no evacuations had been as-yet deliberate for villages downstream from Blatten that might face flooding if the Lonza’s welled-up waters break by way of the pileup of mud.
“We do not need anyone else to go lacking,” he mentioned. “We are going to put no individual at risk on the bottom: No police officer, no soldier, no specialist, no member of civil safety or hearth squads.”
He added: “Somebody requested me earlier than: ‘Who’s the chief in cost right here?’ And I replied, there’s just one chief: nature.”