Two British skiers are among three people killed in an avalanche in the upmarket French ski resort of Val d’Isère.
The avalanche, which occurred at around 11.30am on Friday in the Manchet valley, carried six people down the mountainside and into a stream below, a day after several ski resorts shut down due to the risk of snow slides.
One of the victims was caught in the avalanche high up on the slope while the other two were among a group of five, including a professional guide, lower down the mountain face who did not see the approaching avalanche.
Authorities said two of the skiers were British while the third was a French national.
Météo-France, the national weather service, ⁠had placed ⁠the area under a red alert for avalanche risk on Thursday. Several ski resorts have been forced to shut as a result of heavy snow, among them Plagne, Les Arcs, Peisey-Vallandry and La Grave.
Benoît Bachelet, the Albertville public prosecutor, said an investigation for manslaughter had been opened into the incident.
He added that alcohol and drug tests carried out on the instructor, who is unharmed, were negative.
“We arrived at the scene and quickly found two victims, as they were equipped with all the necessary gear, including avalanche transceivers,” Cédric Bonnevie, director of the Val d’Isère ski patrol, told France Info.
The avalanche, he said, “swept down the slope for 400 metres and ended in a stream, where we found the other two victims, who had died. We called in our dog handlers because their equipment was no longer working.”
The incident unfolded less than 24 hours after the Savoie department was placed on a rare red avalanche alert – a level of warning issued only twice before in the 25 years since its introduction.
Storm Nils had deposited between 60 and 100 centimetres of fresh snow across the region, leaving what Météo-France described on Friday as a “very unstable snow cover”, particularly above 1,800 to 2,000 metres.
Although the red alert was lifted, the risk level remained at four out of five, officially “high”, with avalanches “easily triggered by skiers or hikers” and capable of mobilising “very large volumes of snow”.
The upmarket French ski resort of Val d’Isère
The Val d’Isère tourist office offered its “sincere condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims”. It also recommended that skiers “stay in the safe and marked areas” of the resort.
Authorities also advised against off-piste activities, ski touring and snowshoeing, and urged tourists to “strictly follow” instructions provided by professionals and the ski patrol services.
The deaths follow a day of maximum avalanche alert that saw several ski resorts, notably Tignes and La Plagne, partially or entirely closed their ski areas and impose curfews.
Jean Revial, the mayor of Tignes, took the rare step of ordering residents and holidaymakers to remain indoors from 11pm to 6am as Savoie was placed on red alert for avalanches.
The resort is 78 per cent full and hosting some 20,000 visitors at the height of the school holidays, with pedestrian traffic curtailed between certain villages.
In a separate incident on Friday morning in nearby Tignes, a 23-year-old British skier survived what mountain police described as a near-impossible ordeal.
An avalanche struck shortly after the Val d’Isère slide, burying the young man beneath one and a half metres of snow as he skied off-piste with friends.
Equipped with an avalanche victim detector, he was located rapidly and dug out within 10 minutes by ski patrollers before being transported to Bourg-Saint-Maurice.
“You could say he’s a miracle survivor,” the CRS Alpes mountain rescue police told ICI Pays de Savoie. Life expectancy when buried under snow is commonly estimated at around 15 minutes. He was found conscious and unharmed.
In La Plagne, where more than 1.6 metres of snow fell, the ski area was shut entirely on Thursday.
Videos shared on social media show blizzards hammering the Alps, with large parts of resorts shut because of the snowstorms.
Maximum avalanche risk alert
Slopes in Val Thorens are closed after authorities issued a maximum level 5 avalanche risk alert for the weekend. Avalanche canons have been going off to prevent further catastrophes, residents say.
A maximum avalanche alert has also been set in Savoie due to the endless snowfall in Bonneval-sur-Arc.
There have been at least 25 avalanche deaths in France this winter season.
A 38-year-old man was killed in Saint-Agnès near Grenoble, while another man in his early 30s was crushed to death in Montgenèvre while skiing off-piste on Wednesday.
Last month, a British skier in his 50s was killed in an avalanche in La Plagne. The man was found buried under 8ft of snow by dozens of rescuers, but could not be resuscitated.
Another skier buried in an avalanche in Courchevel was also found dead in a separate incident around the same time.