Snow forces Gotthard Tunnel to close

Gotthard tunnel closed due to snowfall Keystone-SDA

Winter is back: fresh snow led to a number of road accidents in Switzerland on Thursday and caused a widespread power cut. In the evening, the Gotthard Tunnel even had to be closed owing to snowfall. But it will be spring-like warm at Easter.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Over a thousand connections in the Diemtigtal valley in Bern were affected by a widespread power outage on Thursday morning, a BKW spokesperson told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA.

The power went out at 5:52am. Diemtigen in the Bernese Oberland was back on the grid after around two hours, but households in the other municipalities in the valley had to wait longer. Finally, from 10:30am, all customers in the Diemtigtal valley were supplied with electricity again. According to the spokesperson, the breakdown was probably caused by the snow and ice. It had snowed heavily during the night.

+ Eight things you should know about the Gotthard

Thick snowflakes also moved across central Switzerland towards the evening. As a result, the Gotthard tunnel in canton Uri had to be closed at around 7pm, according to the TCS website.

Traffic jams formed as a result. Heavy goods vehicles were stopped on the A2 motorway between Wassen and Göschenen owing to the precipitation. The effects were also felt before the south portal. Between Quinto and Airolo, vehicles were stuck for two kilometres on Thursday evening.

Slippery roads in eastern Switzerland

The St Gallen police reported around a dozen accidents due to wintry roads, half of them on motorways. However, nobody was injured. Most of them involved rear-end collisions or skidding off the carriageway. The same applied to several accidents in Appenzell Outer Rhodes – also without injuries.

Snowstorms swept across Graubünden in eastern Switzerland on Thursday morning, a reporter from Keystone-SDA observed. And the risk of avalanches remains high over the Alpine ridge from Valais in the southwest across central Switzerland to Lake Walen and Appenzellerland, as was reported on the website of the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research on Thursday.

+ ‘Snow Compass’ guides Swiss resorts through declining snowfall 

Otherwise, the snow trickled softly and finely over the towns on the Central Plateau throughout the day, but then disappeared again. The afternoon was simply too warm at around 5°C across the board. Nevertheless, MeteoSwiss, the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, promised 10-30 centimetres of fresh snow for the northern slopes of the Alps above 600 metres on Thursday afternoon, with up to 40 centimetres possible locally.

It should get warmer again next week. According to several weather services, 16°C or more are expected on the Central Plateau on Easter Sunday. The authorities in Ticino have already issued an absolute ban on outdoor fires this Thursday due to the condition of the forest vegetation and soil as well as the persistent drought.

Adapted from German by AI/ts

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]