A piece of a glacier breaks off in the Dolomites, taking several mountaineers with it on the way down into the valley. At least ten people are killed. The accident is likely to be related to the drought and heat in the country.
Because of the warm temperatures, a large piece of the Marmolada glacier breaks away, tearing mountaineers to their deaths.
(dpa)/pop./cov. After the glacier and avalanche accident in the Dolomites last Sunday, the number of victims has risen to ten. The emergency services recovered another body, said the President of the Autonomous Province of Trento, Maurizio Fugatti, to journalists in Canazei on Thursday evening.
The identity of six dead has been clarified. There are two people from the Czech Republic and four from Italy. Five Italians are still considered missing. Carabinieri specialists should now determine whether they are among the bodies already found and clarify the identity of the other victims.
On Thursday, the number two in the Italian state, Senate President Maria Elisabetta Casellati, came to the site to express her condolences. “We have to be clear about the fact that we have an epochal change with climate change,” said the politician from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. The glaciers are melting significantly and therefore a change in policy is necessary.
Search by helicopter
With brutal thunder, masses of ice, snow and rocks fell from the Marmolada glacier in northern Italy into the valley on Sunday afternoon, taking mountaineers with them. After the accident, 13 people were initially missing. There were also eight injured.
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. The entire glacier was closed. The people who were stuck above the scene of the accident were brought down into the valley by helicopter.
Search could take weeks
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.
The search for the missing could take weeks or even longer. That said Maurizio Dellantonio, the president of the Italian mountain rescue service, on Monday. He explained that after the glacial collapse, huge amounts of ice and rock slid into crevasses and crevasses. The crevices should be uncovered later this summer, thanks in part to melting ice, he predicted. “But if someone has fallen into crevasses at the top of the mountain, then it will be difficult,” Dellantonio said.
It is currently not possible to dig because the mass of ice has already settled and has become hard. “That would only work with mechanical equipment, but we can’t bring that up.” There is a risk that more chunks of ice will break loose and fall. Drones are used to search for corpses and material. The ice is sometimes up to ten meters thick, said the mountain rescuer. That is why locating and recovering the bodies is so difficult.
«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.”
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.”