A piece of a glacier breaks off in the Dolomites, taking several mountaineers with it on the way down into the valley. At least seven people are killed. The accident is likely to be related to the drought and heat in the country.
A fatal accident occurs on the Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Dolomites.
(dpa)/pop./cov. The number of victims after the glacier fall on Sunday in the Dolomites has now risen to seven. On Monday, the rescue workers had to rescue another alpinist from the Marmolada glacier. On the day of the accident, the authorities had assumed six victims.
With brute thunder, masses of ice, snow and rocks fell from the glacier in northern Italy into the valley on Sunday afternoon, taking mountaineers with them. After the massive glacier fall on the Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Dolomites, the Italian rescue workers are still looking for 14 missing people. Relatives reported them to the authorities because they no longer received any messages from them. This was explained by the regional president of the Trentino-Alto Adige region, Maurizio Fugatti, on Monday in Canazei at the foot of the mountain.
Two Germans among the injured
According to Fugatti, eight people were injured. Among them are a 67-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman from Germany who have been taken to a clinic in Belluno province, the hospital said. The authorities continued to search for the owners of four cars with foreign license plates on Monday. These parked in the parking lot, which is usually used by the mountaineers who hike towards the Marmolada summit.
A number of cell phone videos showed how the avalanche fell over the rock faces of the massif into the valley. She also plowed down one of the main access routes to the 3,343-meter mountain, which featured several rope teams. At least two were hit. A spokesman for the Italian mountain rescue service told the German Press Agency that it was initially unclear whether there were individual mountaineers at the scene of the accident in addition to the rope teams.
The footage of the large ice avalanche in Marmolada today in close proximity.
We don’t know the author, we will write it in the comments as soon as we will know it.
Indeed an impressive sequence pic.twitter.com/zDo4q40qOP
— Alpine-Adriatic Meteorological Society (@aametsoc) July 3, 2022
All mountain rescuers in the area from the Veneto and Trentino-South Tyrol regions were alerted. They flew five helicopters up the mountain and recovered the dead and injured. Some dog teams were used to search for other victims.
Because of the bad weather and the risk of new glacier falls, the search for further victims was temporarily interrupted. In any case, the emergency services no longer sent people directly onto the avalanche cone because they feared that further glacial falls could break away. A chunk of 200 meters wide, 60 meters high and 80 meters deep hangs dangerously over the slope, said the civil defense. The helicopters continued to operate. The entire glacier was closed. The people who were stuck above the scene of the accident were brought down into the valley by helicopter. There, based on the cars in the parking lots, it was also checked who could still be under the avalanche.
There is practically no chance of finding any survivors under the ice or rubble masses. Rather, according to the rescue team, identifying the bodies will be difficult given the forces with which the avalanche had caught the people.
«Stay as far away from this glacier as possible»
Carlo Budel, the host of the Capanna Punta Penia refuge, spoke in an Instagram video of the “worst possible time and day on which the chunk could come loose”. Shortly after midday, countless mountaineers were out and about on the popular massif on a summery Sunday. Budel asked all alpinists not to come to the Marmolada until further notice. “Stay as far away from this glacier as possible,” warned the innkeeper.
“We heard a loud noise, typical of a landslide,” said an eyewitness to the Ansa news agency. “After that we saw an avalanche of snow and ice fall at high speed towards the valley and we knew that something bad had happened.” The avalanche is said to have rolled around three hundred meters.
Mountain rescuer Luigi Felicetti reported: «When we arrived on site, we were presented with an incredible picture. There were blocks of ice and huge stones everywhere. Then we started looking for people.”
Prime Minister Mario Draghi expressed his condolences to the victims and their families in the evening and announced that he would be kept up to date by civil defense and regional politicians.
Temperature records the day before and on Sunday
There was initially no official information on the cause of the accident – however, everything indicates that the high temperatures of the past few days, weeks and months are likely to play a role. According to media reports, a record value of ten degrees was measured on the summit of the mountain on Saturday. On Sunday, this was broken again with 10.3 degrees. “I’ve never seen anything like it on the Marmolada. It wasn’t a normal avalanche like in winter,” said a mountain rescuer. He compared the accident to a building and spoke of a “structural failure”.
Italy registered much less precipitation than usual last winter, and many glaciers are now missing snow to protect them from the sun and the warm temperatures.
Messner: “Happens every day”
Several Italian newspapers quoted the South Tyrolean alpinist Reinhold Messner on Sunday. He has climbed to Punta Rocca several times, but not for many years. “The ice has almost completely melted there,” said Messner. The reason is clear: global warming is leading to glacier melt and increasing the likelihood that a piece of the glacier will detach. So-called ice towers – known as séracs – would then form just at the cliff edges. “They can be as big as skyscrapers or rows of houses,” says the alpinist. “We will see incidents like the Marmolada more often,” said Messner. “Today there are more rock and ice breaks than in the past.”