Days after a natural disaster strikes, you often find survivors combing through rubble for their belongings or shoveling mud out of their crumbling homes. You might see prime ministers walking around the zone offering condolences, or rescue crews operating big, mechanical diggers to clear the scene.
But the Swiss village of Blatten is caught in a kind of post-catastrophe paralysis. Buried under millions of cubic meters of rock and ice debris, it has been all but wiped off the map. And the site is still too unstable for crews to access, almost a week after the Birch glacier collapsed and swallowed the Alpine idyll.
“It was like an explosion — like an explosion in my heart,” evacuee Daniel Ritler told DW as he looked out over his buried hometown. “We knew immediately that everything was destroyed.”
“For seconds, there was an emptiness. You could really feel it,” he added. “There was still a bit of hope, but as soon as the fog cleared, we saw the catastrophe.”
Evacuated in time
Ritler, who kept sheep and ran a tourism business in Blatten, is staying with friends for now. “We lost our house, our stables, and of course, all those memories. We lived in a little paradise,” he said.
Though the deluge is thought to have claimed one life, Ritler and the other roughly 300 residents were evacuated in time. And many here feel lucky to be alive — aware that a similar event in a less wealthy country could have wrought even more damage.
We meet him in Wiler, 3.5 kilometers (2.1 miles) from Blatten and the closest accessible point to the disaster zone, which is now serving as a crisis coordination hub. Here, the usual Alpine soundtrack of birdsong and the river rushing down the valley is drowned out by helicopters taking off, transporting scientists and geologists to survey the damage aerially, and assess the risk of further fallout.
Mountain populations ‘more and more threatened’
One of those experts is glaciologist Saskia Gindraux. “We had a lot of rock and silt and sediment going onto a glacier, and this mass caused the glacier to really push forward — and everything just went down the valley,” she explained.
The Swiss scientist told DW that a “coincidence of causes” led to the collapse. “It’s hard to say this is linked to climate change and this one is not. It’s hard to put a label on an event, but we are facing really high temperatures here in the Alps,” she told DW. “It’s twice the normal increase of other parts of the world,” she added.
Alpine glaciers have been retreating for decades, which Gindraux said makes the rock less stable. “That’s one cause … The other one is maybe permafrost that is melting, and the other one, the geology.”
“With climate change, we saw that the oldest natural hazards, so rock fall or glacier collapse or landslides, etc, they increase in frequency.”
“The population in the mountains are more and more threatened with these types of events.”
Fears neighbors ‘won’t come back’
Aside from the hum of helicopters, the streets of Wiler are quiet. Local resident Alex Rieder is packing up his car: Two black bin bags full of clothes and other basics for his neighbors who have found themselves suddenly homeless.
“Will they be compensated for the belongings they lost?” he wondered. “That has to happen quickly. Now because people need money to live. Because if they’re gone for 10 or 20 years, they won’t come back,” Rieder told DW.
Rieder fears for the future of life in this part of the Alps. “There’s only one school left in the entire valley,” he said. Inside his garage, Rieder shows us masks he helped craft for the local carnival — just one of many traditions dating back centuries here. He knows that if more people leave, this cultural heritage will become harder and harder to hold onto.
But asked if he thinks it will disappear entirely, Rieder is defiant.
“Traditions will never die. That will be the last thing. Because that’s what gives people the most strength.”
No more evacuations planned
No further evacuations are planned in nearby towns or villages for now. But they remain on high alert. Some 45 minutes’ drive away in Gampel, flood prevention measures are in place, with some smaller bridges deliberately deconstructed to avoid further fallout.
“We now have to see how the dangers develop further at the site of the damage. Rock masses could continue to fall from the mountain — and we have to keep monitoring how the danger develops in terms of the course of the river,” regional president Christian Rieder told DW on Sunday.
“Depending on how the danger develops … we will take further measures,” he added.
The situation was “stable” on Monday with “no notable changes” at the Birch glacier, according to Swiss broadcaster RTS. But smaller landslides continue, and there has been “no improvement” to allow crews to enter the zone securely.
‘We have to find a new purpose’
For survivors whose homes and livelihoods are buried in a greyish-brown debris, which authorities say is 100 meters (328 feet) deep in some areas, it’s clear there’s no going back.
From the drivers’ seat of his van, with the views of lush mountain landscapes filling the windows and wing mirrors bearing the disaster that unfolded here, evacuee Daniel Ritler told DW it is hard to imagine what life after Blatten might look like.
“I built a farm from scratch, always adapting to the challenges of the future,” he said, adding: “That was before.”
“Now we have to find a new place to live and a new purpose. And it will certainly take some time until we can find our way again.”
