Further villages in Swiss landslide area avoid damage for now

Around 90% of the village of Blatten was submerged on Wednesday by masses of mud, ice, and rock. Keystone-SDA

Despite the large build-up of water and debris after the landslide in Blatten on Wednesday afternoon, damage to villages downstream had not been reported by the next morning. One man is still missing.

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A lake that has built up behind the landslide debris in Blatten, canton Valais, has continued to fill up, a spokesperson for the Lötschental emergency services told the Keystone-SDA news agency on Thursday morning.

As a precautionary measure, some buildings in the downstream municipalities of Wiler and Kippel were evacuated on Wednesday. There is a possibility that large outflows from the lake could erode the land along the Lonza river, the spokesperson said.

On Wednesday afternoon, the village of Blatten was almost fully buried when a huge section of glacier crashed down a nearby mountain. A 64-year-old local man was reported missing, and search dogs have been deployed.

Authorities plan to hold a media conference on Thursday to provide more information on developments in the area.

>> Watch the collapse of the Birch Glacier above Blatten in southern Switzerland on May 28, 2025:

>>Blatten before and after the landslide: on November 3, 2024, and May 29, 2025:

Tremors throughout the country

The tremors caused by the glacier collapse in the Lötschental valley on Wednesday were felt across Switzerland. According to experts at the federal institute for technology ETH Zurich, it was one of the largest mass movements ever recorded.

Various smaller rockfalls from the Kleine Nesthorn mountain in the days leading up to the collapse were already noted by earthquake trackers, the Swiss Seismological Service (SED) at ETH Zurich wrote online.

The first of these tremors was recorded early on May 19 – the day when around 300 residents of the village of Blatten were evacuated for safety reasons. When the landslide started on Wednesday at 3:24pm, tremors of a magnitude of 3.1 were recorded.

The magnitude is based on the maximum measured amplitude of the movement. The movements were noted by SED stations across Switzerland. In terms of tremor strength, the landslide near Blatten is comparable to what happened above Bondo, canton Graubünden, in 2017.

Translated from German by DeepL/dos

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