Tess McClure reports on a landslide in Switzerland that left one person missing and destroyed a village
The Swiss village of Blatten was wiped out in seconds. A glacier collapsed above the village on 28 May, triggering a landslide. The 300 residents had been evacuated a week earlier, but a 64-year-old man who is believed to have stayed is missing.
Tess McClure, the Guardian’s commissioning editor for the Age of Extinction, reported on the aftermath.
“The Birch glacier, which sits above Blatten, is this ancient slab of ice,” she tells Helen Pidd. “It had been loaded up with rocks and debris from the mountain above and just gave way and crumbled.
“The millions of tonnes of rock, enormous chunks of ice, all of the mud and trees and debris that it had swept up along the way, all of that just fell down the mountain on to Blatten village.”
