Rebuilding was never in question.<\/p>\n
The melting glacier collapsed on a Wednesday in May, a cascade of boulders and ice and water burying recently evacuated homes and farms in the village of Blatten. It took half a minute. By the start of the next week, authorities were already drafting plans for a new village, in the same valley, with the threats of a warming world still lurking in the Alps all around.<\/p>\n
Blatten was home to 300 people before disaster struck; some families had been there for hundreds of years. The authorities do not know where exactly the new town will sit. But they have estimated it will cost Swiss taxpayers more than $100 million to build. Insurance payouts from the disaster are expected to add another $400 million for reconstruction.<\/p>\n
It is a high-altitude example of the financial and emotional damage that Europe is suffering as the climate changes.<\/p>\n
Months after the catastrophe, residents and authorities in the L\u00f6tschental Valley<\/a> are still plagued by questions. How aggressively can their government clear red tape to build new homes? How many residents will rebuild their lives in the new Blatten? And how will they navigate the dangers posed by the glacier that lies on the ruins of the village like a dying dragon, still melting, still moving, still muddying the question of where in the valley is safe?<\/p>\n What local leaders \u2014 and every resident I spoke with on a recent trip to the valley \u2014 are not asking is whether the villagers should move out of the mountains. That would be an existential question, for Swiss identity and for settlement across the Alps.<\/p>\n \u201cOur heart is here,\u201d said Daniel Ritler, a lifelong Blatten resident who lost his house, his sprawling farm and the guest rooms he rented to tourists. \u201cIt was our paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n The government\u2019s rebuilding effort is led by Franziska Biner, the head of the energy and finance department of the Swiss canton, or state, of Valais, which includes Blatten. \u201cWe cannot say everyone needs to leave the places that are dangerous,\u201d she explained in an interview, \u201cbecause then we need to leave the canton.\u201d<\/p>\n Researchers have long warned of the accelerating dangers that climate change, which is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, poses to people and property in mountainous areas like the Alps<\/a>.<\/p>\n Swiss researchers say the country has warmed twice as fast as the global average<\/a>. Higher temperatures are thawing permafrost that acts as a sort of mountainside glue, raising the risks of landslides and rockfalls that can quickly turn deadly.<\/p>\n Warming is also reducing the number of good powder days at ski resorts, cutting into the tourism revenue<\/a> that so many Alpine economies depend on. (The relative lack of snow also will lessen the damage from avalanches in the coming decades, researchers predict, but few in Switzerland are celebrating that trade-off.)<\/p>\n In recent years, no warming effect has more dramatically hit the Alps than glacial loss. Swiss glaciers lost more than 40 percent<\/a> of their ice volume between 1980 and 2016, scientists have found. They lost another 10 percent in just two years, 2022 and 2023. Austria and France have seen similar shrinkage. In Valais alone, researchers now classify 80 glaciers<\/a> as potentially dangerous for people or property.<\/p>\n Deteriorating glaciers can quickly collapse<\/a>, as the people of Blatten learned in May.<\/p>\n The Birch Glacier had loomed in the peaks above the village for as long as people lived in the L\u00f6tschental. But it was melting, and so was the permafrost above it. Rockfalls were weighing on it. Researchers were watching for signs of trouble. Last spring, they saw them \u2014 and quickly evacuated the village.<\/p>\n A couple of days later, Lars Gustke, who operates a cable car that runs up the other side of the valley, watched in horror as the glacier above Blatten collapsed. The ice and parts of the mountain it swept along mashed homes and dammed the river on the valley floor, which quickly formed a small lake that swamped other buildings.<\/p>\n Nicole Kalbermatten and Lilian Ritler \u2014 a distant cousin of Daniel Ritler; Blatten is full of Ritlers \u2014 were working that day at L\u00f6tschental Marketing AG, the valley tourism board, which has offices beneath the cable car station. The lights flickered off, then back on, and Ms. Ritler opened a window. A pressure wave slammed into the building, set off by the glacier smashing downhill. Ms. Ritler rushed to find Ms. Kalbermatten, her best friend from the village.<\/p>\n \u201cBlatten,\u201d she said, \u201cis gone.\u201d<\/p>\n Gone were the three hotels that had housed skiers and hikers. Gone were the barns in the oldest section of the village. Gone was the communal oven where residents baked bread.<\/p>\n Only one resident died, thanks to the early warning and evacuation. Newly homeless residents moved in with friends in neighboring villages, or into vacant vacation homes that strangers offered up nearby. Then they grieved. \u201cYou don\u2019t just lose the house,\u201d Ms. Ritler said. \u201cYou lose the lanes, the church and your childhood.\u201d<\/p>\n But you do not lose the village, at least in name. Swiss officials are committed to that.<\/p>\n Ms. Biner and her colleagues on the council that governs the canton decided within a week of the collapse that they must rebuild. They drafted a plan, presented in September, to do so within five years \u2014 with the first returning residents moving into new homes as early as next year. They have quickly reaped about $75 million worth of aid from private donors, nonprofits and government bodies. The state pledged about $125 million. Insurance companies are expected to pay about $400 million more.<\/p>\n \u201cThe new Blatten will be a different Blatten. The memories have been evacuated along with the people,\u201d the mayor, Matthias Bellwald, said in an interview at the end of what used to be the road to the village. \u201cIt will certainly be a modern village. It will be a beautiful village.\u201d<\/p>\n To help in the choosing of a site, government experts are refreshing their danger map of the valley \u2014 for avalanches, rockfalls and other natural disasters affected by warming temperatures. The glacier remains a destabilizing wild card.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s still moving. The ice still needs to melt,\u201d Ms. Biner said. \u201cYou have this lake that was built because of this mass that is there. So as long as this mass moves, the lake moves\u201d \u2014 which makes new construction a challenge.<\/p>\n It could take years for the full risk picture for a new village to become clear. <\/p>\n Displaced residents who have returned to the ruined village, which remains buried and flooded, describe the experience in traumatic terms. They have also taken an economic hit. The disaster crimped this summer\u2019s tourist season in the valley and will likely hurt winter revenues in the neighboring villages where many former Blatten residents work. Villagers are debating whether to eventually move to the new Blatten or stay where they are. Few are considering leaving the mountains entirely.<\/p>\n In other parts of the world, critics have questioned<\/a> whether it makes sense to rebuild communities<\/a> that are increasingly vulnerable to disaster in a warming world, including parts of the United States that have battled repeat flooding or rising seas.<\/p>\n That\u2019s rare in Switzerland. Parliament has backed the Blatten rebuilding effort. With a few exceptions, so have other civic leaders. Alpine life, people told me at every stop for this story, is a defining part of the Swiss identity, even for people who live and work in large cities like Zurich or Geneva.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m happily paying taxes, and I think the majority does, to allow these valleys to be inhabited,\u201d Flavio Anselmetti, a geologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, said in an interview.<\/p>\n But, he said, with warming temperatures changing risk profiles in mountainous regions, \u201csome areas will have to be declared, OK, no, here we cannot rebuild. And then people are compensated in a way that the society or the village or the state gives them money or ground to build somewhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Ritler, the farmer, and his wife, Karin, briefly debated moving far from the Alps. But they decided to stay \u2014 not in the new Blatten, but in a nearby village, where they are refurbishing an old hotel, part of an effort to revitalize tourism in the area.<\/p>\n They recognize the risks of life in the valley, Mr. Ritler said, but the Alps are too deeply ingrained in his life to leave.<\/p>\n \u201cI told Karin, \u2018If you\u2019re afraid, we need to talk about it,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s not a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe must have respect for nature,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe are lucky we were evacuated. And we are lucky that we are healthy and have two hands. And with these two hands, we want to achieve something.\u201d<\/p>\n Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rebuilding was never in question. The melting glacier collapsed on a Wednesday in May, a cascade of boulders…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[1822,50,18086,35141,2557,35142,16643,458,8471,17,26808],"class_list":{"0":"post-64373","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-alps","8":"tag-alpine-skiing","9":"tag-alps","10":"tag-alps-mountains","11":"tag-area-planning-and-renewal","12":"tag-avalanches","13":"tag-blatten-switzerland","14":"tag-glaciers","15":"tag-global-warming","16":"tag-mountains","17":"tag-switzerland","18":"tag-travel-and-vacations"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116564050871253339","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}