 Poster: A snowHead
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A very good summary and images…and very scary.
I recall being astonished after driving past a lake created by a huge landslide in the late 1980s. It was not far from Bormio and cut off that area by main road, from the Italian side, for a few months I think.
This Blatten one looks to be on a much bigger and more destructive scale. Hope the villages further down the valley escape harm.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Now it’s been a few days since the Blatten disaster – geologists have had time to examine the site, and the conclusion is that the result is actually worse than the predicted worst-case scenario.
The debris field extends beyond the prediction – by as much as several hundred meters.
Walter Wildi, professor of Geology at the University of Geneva, told the press that the miscalculation may be due to the fact it wasn’t a landslide at such – but a glacier collapse, which wasn’t considered.
He says glacial mass is far harder to predict and scientists have far less experience.
Meanwhile, hope is fading for a 64-year-old shepherd in Blatten.
Known as Toni, he’s been missing since the rockslide on Wednesday. It’s thought he was in his barn with his animals. The barn was 300 meters outside the evacuation zone.
He looked after around 100 white Alpine sheep. They were regularly put in competition. Locals say he was kind and quiet – but did enjoy the company of his friends.
It’s now highly likely Toni will be the only victim of the disaster.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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Another Swiss village partially evacuated, Around 30 residents evacuated from Val de Bagnes in canton Valais
Around 30 residents were evacuated on Sunday in the upper Val de Bagnes in canton Valais due to heavy rainfall. People from Les Epenays, a village near Lourtier, were affected.
These residents will be “housed elsewhere for an indefinite period. It depends on nature, it makes the laws”, Antoine Schaller, deputy secretary general of the municipality of Val de Bagnes, told the Keystone-SDA news agency. Two farms in Fregnoley were also evacuated.
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@Alastair Pink, there was a very big slide just near there last summer.
A friend of ours only just evacuated in time, but her house, farm buildings , some animals etc were totally buried and will now never be uncovered.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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@rungsp, 
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You'll need to Register first of course.
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Hope they were insured
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@robs1, yes....but when you've utterly lost :
House
Farm buildings
All machinery
Farm dogs and other pets
Some livestock
100% of your personal possessions
75% of your farmland (buried deeply by gravel and rocks, it will never be farmland again).
The family had the clothes they stood up in, a car and a laptop.
OMG it must be hard.
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| rungsp wrote: |
@robs1, yes....but when you've utterly lost :
House
Farm buildings
All machinery
Farm dogs and other pets
Some livestock
100% of your personal possessions
75% of your farmland (buried deeply by gravel and rocks, it will never be farmland again).
The family had the clothes they stood up in, a car and a laptop.
OMG it must be hard. |
Yes it's terrible for them,and as a farmer I understand their feelings, losing animals that you have spent years breeding families from is extremely hard especially in those circumstances, money doesn't solve that but does help replacing the material things.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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The odds must be slim to vanishing that they are insured for the value of the land that (to all intents and purposes) no longer exists.
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| James the Last wrote: |
| The odds must be slim to vanishing that they are insured for the value of the land that (to all intents and purposes) no longer exists. |
To be pedantic it still exists but not in the way it did, if the authorities forced them to evacuate then you would expect them to pay some form of compensation or allow them back, if they wanted too of course. Most swiss farms would be pretty small and their house and buildings would be insured, possibly the insurers might claim act of god to get out of paying though
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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From earlier in the thread
BobinCH wrote
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In Switzerland, damage to buildings and businesses caused by natural disasters like landslides is typically covered under standard building insurance policies. This coverage falls under “natural hazards” (Elementarschäden), which includes events such as floods, storms, avalanches, rockfalls, and landslides.
In most Swiss cantons, building insurance is mandatory and provided by cantonal insurance institutions. However, in the GUSTAVO cantons—Geneva, Uri, Schwyz, Ticino, Appenzell Innerrhoden, Valais, and Obwalden—building insurance is not mandatory, and property owners must obtain coverage through private insurers.
Specifically, in Valais, where Blatten is located, building insurance is not compulsory. Therefore, coverage depends on whether property owners had voluntarily secured private building insurance that includes natural hazard protection. If such insurance was in place, damages from natural disasters like landslides would generally be covered. However, without this insurance, property owners might not receive compensation for such damages. |
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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The Nouvelliste said that the army have started clearing the debris to enable the waters to recede
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You know it makes sense.
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Swiss village's loss in rockslide puts focus on Alpine disaster readiness in Kandersteg
In the Swiss Alpine resort of Kandersteg, officials have been closely monitoring a deteriorating mountain peak that towers above its picturesque homes and hotels, after a glacier collapse and massive rockslide buried a neighbouring village weeks ago.The destruction late in May of Blatten, a village of around 300 people in the Loe tschental valley, threw into sharp relief concern about the impact of melting permafrost as temperatures trend higher on Alpine mountain ranges.
"Of course, Blatten really upset us," said Kandersteg's mayor Rene Maeder. "It really gets under your skin. You're speechless when you see those images of the violence of nature."
Still, Maeder was confident Kandersteg's dams and daily monitoring prepared it well to avert disaster, with researchers checking the mountain via GPS, radar and drone.
There has been a heightened threat of rockslides in Kandersteg since 2018, when paragliders noted that Spitzer Stein, a distinctive rocky peak crowning a lush Alpine landscape, was losing height and that bits had broken off it.
Kandersteg was a prime example of an area with historical structural instability that could be aggravated by many factors, including permafrost, said Robert Kenner at the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos.
"What calmed down for about 3,000 years is now reactivated," he said.
Sensors monitoring GPS locations on the Spitzer Stein showed the mountain shifting by up to 70 centimetres (2.3 feet) a day, Maeder said.
In the event of major rock movement, residents should receive warnings at least 48 hours in advance.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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Poster: A snowHead
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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@Alastair Pink, very interesting article. Explains the dilemma faced, even by one of the richest countries in the world, as a consequence of climate warming.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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The other issue is the rapid accumulation of water in proglacial lakes due to significant melting.
The authorities in Tignes became concerned with one in the Grand Motte above Tignes 3 years ago when it appeared at the surface close to where the late Rossolin drag started. That summer they dug a quick trench to drain some of it down the Valley to the North of La Grande Casse. Since then there has been numerous studies including divers being lowered inside the glacier and pumps have been fitted to reduce the threat of sudden inundation.
At one stage one estimate was 150000 cubic metres of water in the lake. A full Lac du Chevril contains 235000 cubic metres.
The big issue is a sudden mass release of the proglacial lake- history in the Alps is littered with lost villages with originally no known reason - we now know.
If it happened in Tignes then Club Med could be washed away (no bad thing) or it would be a beach front property for a while. As Lac de Tignes empties through an underground pipe it would become a high pressure waterspout until overwhelmed at which point the water would escape over the snow front flooding the car parks and old garage. If Lac du Chevril was full then there would be quite a waterfall above Brev and surf would be up in Bourg.
I’m reassured they are on the case!
Scroll down a bit:
https://mairie-tignes.fr/tignes-sengage/amenagement-durable-du-territoire/
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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@Scarlet, that article is an amazing story.
@chocksaway, St Gervais is notorious for its disaster back in 1892 when a water pocket in the Glacier du Tete Rousse released its contents down the valley and destroyed multiple buildings and some 200 lives. The risk remains, and in 2010 another water pocket was found and artificially drained in a controlled manner; for good reason there is ongoing monitoring.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
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A fascinating and, IMO, well written article.
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@Jäger, I particularly liked the description of the meteorologist watching the thunderstorm from the tent, fascinated by it, only for the horror to dawn that it was likely to kill them all!
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Another Swiss location is anxiously watching the nearby mountainside for a possible landslide. Swiss mountainside fault grows as evacuation plans prepared
The “Fios fault” in the Val d’Anniviers region in southern Switzerland has now stretched to 250 metres and continues to grow. Authorities fear part of the mountainside could give way and are preparing safety measures and local evacuation plans.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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@Alastair Pink, quite a sight. Interesting how the boulder seems to slide down the slope rather than rolls. I guess with the moisture/snow still on the surface.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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 Some very lucky people there.
Melting of the permafrost or geological failure?
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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@chocksaway, …good question. We know that there are a number of things happening:
1 intense storms are becoming more frequent or put another way, the intensity of storms is increasing
More water vapour is held by a warming atmosphere and so the release as precipitation is more intense.
The opening crack at Vissioe - the Fios Fault - was putatively caused by the 2024 floods which weakened the river bed. Water is essentially an incompressible substance which does a lot of damage when it moves enmasse. It can also carry debris, which causes further erosion. In high gravity settings like the Alps, hillsides can get ripped to pieces incredibly quickly, particularly when the rock is chossy (see below).
2 Glaciers are melting, exerting very high hydraulic pressure
It is difficult to know what is happening within and on the deep margins of specific glaciers, but the water output of melting glaciers can be stored internally and released suddenly. As with glacial lakes with collapsing dams, this can cause a sudden massive failure of built up debris and moraines and has been implicated in a series of recent and historic disasters around the world.
3 Mountains can lose cohesion and this can be exacerbated by the reduction of permafrost - and the problem of choss
Blatten - and the avalanche at Crans Montana a couple of years earlier - were caused by mountain mass detaching and then weighting ice (the glacier at Blatten) and snow (the snow avalanche at Montana). This kind of decay has always happened (eg the huge rockfalls at Derborance in 1714 and 1749) and stems not least from the chossy nature of the Alps. They are (still) essentially moving piles of sedimentary rock, and when buckled and shifted and weathered and compressed - are not the most stable of types and areas of rock. The whole of the northern flank of the Rhone valley from Sion eastwards is essentially a slumped shelf of collapsed rock which fell when the glacier left the base of the Rhone Valley. All the roads and houses (our shack too) are on this unstable, mighty deep pile of many millions of cubic metres of rubble. Half Dome is a huge mass of granite (Yellowstone National Park). Stable, young, untransformed. Formed 83-93 Million years ago. The Matterhorn is a pile of choss. Unstable, ancient - rock deposited in oceans 250 million years and upwelled into the Alps 100 million years ago and still moving. Have you tried bending slate? Doesn’t like it. Now imagine sedimentary rocks laid flat in an ocean, metamorphosed by heat and pressure and bent hither and thither like cardboard to make an Alp. It’s not very stable stuff.
When the Grom and I (finally) did the TrubelStock (3000m) in Summer ‘24, we climbed up through the meadows above Cave du Sex - lovely (perfect grass on rubble, totally deceptive) - up to the ridge (loose small rubble covered with goat poo) - around the back of the ‘hump’ (huge scree slopes as far as the eye could see, with the constant clatter of rocks falling 100m or so from the hump) - up the steep route to the top (over loose boulders, enormous piles of rubble, gravel patches, loose stones, you get the idea) - up to the soft and flaking top. The whole bloody thing felt like a liability of looseness.
All of this catastrophic (to humans) decay is a continuing and constant process - but global warming sure has speeded things up.
I went up to the Bertol Hut a few years ago and amongst the many exciting things of the day (massive collapse of the seracs to the South of Mt Du Collon - gapow!!! Rumble rumble rumble….) we looked to our right to see a huge boulder sliding down the side of the valley. Just like in the video, but without snow to lubricate it. Down it slid, sedately and certainly, like it was popping down the mountain to see some friends for lunch. Gulp.
Fast forward a few years and the Grom and I are downhilling at Vercorin. We decide to do some high speed nonsense on the fire roads. Stopping to catch breath we suddenly hear what sounds like a house tumbling and crashing through the forest - HUGE crashing and smashing. Since we are on one of the most notoriously unstable areas of the Valais we know it’s ‘just’ a huge boulder on the move. Hopefully not as far as the road or the villages below……
Last edited by And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports. on Sun 19-04-26 20:56; edited 3 times in total
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@valais2, Brilliant, thanks.
Very familiar with 2, as a proglacial lake formed within the Grand Motte Glacier above Tignes. They drained 150,000 cubic metres of water out to prevent a cataclysmic failure (which would have given me a beach side apartment if only for a few moments). It would have then travelled down the ravine to Lac du Chevril - which could have created havoc with the Dam.
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You know it makes sense.
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@Alastair Pink, jesus! Some very lucky people in that cable car!
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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@Steilhang, hence the repeated understandable utterances of "Scheisse!" and "O mein Gott!" 
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Poster: A snowHead
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Is that the same lift that had a gondola fall off a couple of months ago?
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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| Alastair Pink wrote: |
| @Steilhang, hence the repeated understandable utterances of "Scheisse!" and "O mein Gott!" |
He correctly points out : "Alter, wenn das den Pfosten trifft haben wir ein Problem!", followed by "Bleib rechts du *§#" followed by several bouts of Scheisse and Oh mein Gott.
I thought they handled it quite calmly all in all.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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@Steilhang, indeed. 
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