About one in three campsites in Switzerland is situated in or near a risk zone along rivers, lakes or in avalanche regions, an in-depth analysis has found.
Altogether, there are 444 campsites across the country and some of them are open all year round, according to a syndicated report by the SonntagsZeitung and Le Matin Dimanche newspapers.
People living in these natural hazard zonesExternal link during the winter or bad weather spells with high waters could get killed, an expert of the Federal Environment Agency is quoted in the report.
He stressed the importance of emergency plans for all the campsites.
However, there are considerable regional differences due to a wide-ranging local autonomy and also a lack of risk consciousness among clients of the campsites, according to the newspapers.
On Saturday, the newspapers of the Tamedia publishing house put online a nationwide map, based on information from the country’s 26 cantonal authorities.
The authors or the report claim that there are more than one million people in Switzerland (with a total population of 8.5 million) living in a flood risk zone, 65,000 of them even in a high-risk area.
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If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.