An avalanche caused by the collapse of an Alpine glacier buries a village in Switzerland.

Geneva, May 28 (EFE).- An avalanche of ice, rocks, and mud buried almost the entire village of Blatten, in the Swiss canton of Valais, after the collapse of the Birch Glacier, leaving 300 people homeless and one missing.

The devastatingly violent landslide swept away 90% of the town center and caused the release of some 3.5 million cubic meters of material that descended the slope at high speed, also blocking the course of the Lonza River, according to reports broadcast from the scene by Swiss public television station RTS.

A series of drone images show a gray blanket where houses, roads, and meadows once stood.

A quantity of rocks had begun to fall from the glacier in the middle of the month and increased as the days passed, which led to a rapid assessment of the situation and the issuance of an evacuation order for the town's 300 inhabitants, after the great instability of the terrain was confirmed.

“We knew it was just a matter of time. The slope was saturated with meltwater, and the glacier acted as an unstable wedge between the rock and the void. It was a natural disaster, but not a surprise,” Kamal Weiss, one of the experts monitoring the glacier, told Swiss media.

The economic impact is considerable due to the destruction of local infrastructure and the blockage of the Lonza River, which poses new flood risks in the coming days, authorities have said.

For their part, several experts have commented that Blatten's case is yet another warning about the consequences of climate change in mountain regions, where areas previously considered safe could become unstable in the coming years. EFE

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