Media: Clearing aftermath of glacier collapse in Switzerland could take six years

The debris removal in the Lötschental Valley in Switzerland, where part of a glacier collapsed onto a village on May 28, could take nearly six years.

This estimate is based on preliminary calculations reported by the portal 20 Minuten, per Caliber.Az.

According to their data, the glacier collapse buried the village of Blatten under at least 3 million cubic meters of rock and debris. If the cleanup uses trucks with a maximum load of 25 tons, more than 200,000 trips will be required. The portal concludes that if 100 trucks continuously haul the debris out of the valley, it would take 5 years and 9 months. So far, authorities have not provided an official estimate for the duration of the restoration work.

Authorities in the canton of Valais, where Blatten is located, reported on May 30 that since the glacier debris is blocking the flow of the Lonza River, water continues to accumulate near the buried village, forming a lake. There is a risk of flooding, and residents of downstream settlements have been evacuated, with more than 350 people relocated.

Restoration efforts have not yet begun because the fallen mass remains unstable, the cantonal authorities said.

According to an operational report from the emergency response headquarters published on Thursday afternoon, May 29, the threat of new mudflows remains on both sides of the valley. The situation on the Kleine Nesthorn mountain remains unstable. Hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of rock are still at risk of collapse. In addition, new landslides could be triggered by the accumulation of unstable mixtures of rock, ice, and water in the valley.

The emergency report specifies that on Wednesday, May 28, nearly the entire Birch Glacier (Birchgletscher) above Blatten collapsed into the valley. As a result, a layer of ice and debris several tens of meters thick and about two kilometres long formed at the valley floor. Almost the entire village was buried under the debris, and the Lonza River was blocked. This caused the formation of a lake that flooded homes which had survived the collapse. According to cantonal authorities, the main current danger relates to the river’s behaviour and the volume of accumulated water.

By Tamilla Hasanova