Geneva: Eight hikers are missing after a massive landslide swept away an entire mountainside in the Swiss Alps, ripping apart buildings and forcing the evacuation of a village, police said on Thursday.
The landslide, which struck on Wednesday, sent mud, rocks and dirt flooding down the Piz Cengalo mountain into the outskirts of the village of Bondo, near the Italian border.
About 100 people were evacuated, some airlifted out by helicopters. Police in the canton of Graubunden had initially announced that no one was hurt.
But on Thursday they acknowledged that rescue workers were flying over the area in search of mountain climbers and hikers who might have been hit by the massive slide.
“In the region of Val Bondasca, eight people who were there at the time of the landslide have not been found,” said a police statement, adding that the missing were German, Swiss and Austrian citizens.
Swiss daily Blick reported that four of the missing were German, while two were Swiss and two Austrian.
A police spokesman told the 20 Minuten daily that there were no children among the missing, who were all believed to be hikers.
Six of the eight had been reported missing by their relatives, police said, adding that the search for them had intensified overnight, with a Swiss army helicopter taking part.
The event was so severe that the vibrations set off seismometers across Switzerland, which measured the equivalent of a magnitude 3.0 earthquake, according to the Swiss Seismological Service.
Images showed an unstoppable mass of thick mud and sludge moving down the mountainside like lava, ripping apart at least one building in its path and partially engulfing others.
A broad swathe of farmland was engulfed in the river of debris.
Police said 12 farm buildings, including barns and stables, had been destroyed, while Graubunden’s main southern highway was closed to traffic.
“The affected area was really vast,” said Simona Rauch, a Protestant minister at a church in Val Bregaglia, a valley that groups several villages including Bondo.
She said that there were always many tourists hiking there at this time of year. — AFP
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