Army to withdraw from buried Swiss village

Blatten: the army will complete its mission on Monday evening Keystone-SDA

Active in landslide-hit Blatten since June 27, the Swiss army will be leaving the area on Monday evening. Most of the debris floating on Lake Blatten has been removed.

On the afternoon of May 28, part of the Birch glacier above Blatten broke off. Millions of cubic metres of rubble, ice and water broke away, burying the small village in the Upper Valais region in less than a minute.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Initially, the army intervened on the basis of the ordinance on disaster relief and continued its mission at the request of the Blatten municipal authorities.

In step with the rain

Since the end of June, the army has been carrying out the tasks requested by the municipality: clearing the lake of driftwood and recovered parts of houses (roofs, sections of barns blown away by the landslide), as well as sorting and preparing the materials removed from the water for processing. “With a current depth of around 40 cm, the lake no longer allows us to use our boats,” explains the lieutenant-colonel of territorial division 1, Jean-Claude Gagliardi, explaining the end of the current mission.

“Every major rainstorm washes away driftwood. Some of it accumulates at the outlet of the lake. However, we can estimate that most of the wood that was floating when we arrived has been removed from the lake,” continues Gagliardi.

The wood collected was burnt by the army, in collaboration with the Lötschental fire brigade, on the orders of the municipality of Blatten. Any personal effects found were returned to their owners.

No official figure

“It is not possible to give an order of magnitude for the volume of waste recovered. The quantity of debris and wood extracted from the lake is not measured,” said Gagliardi. A month ago, the Valais environment department mentioned that about 480 cubic metres of floating waste had to be evacuated.

Thirty soldiers were deployed between June 27 and August 3. They included engineers, infantrymen and mountain specialists. The Air Force “flew for around thirty hours”, according to information from the army press service.

From Monday until August 29, the emergency road leading to the main hamlets of Blatten will be consolidated and made safe.

Adapted from French by DeepL/ac

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail].