CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland\u00a0\u2014\u00a0About 40 people were killed and 115 others injured, most of them seriously, after a fire ripped through a New Year\u2019s celebration in a Swiss Alpine resort bar less than two hours after midnight Thursday, police said.<\/p>\n
Authorities did not immediately have an exact count of the dead.<\/p>\n
The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue, and overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of one of Switzerland\u2019s worst tragedies. The country will observe five days of mourning.<\/p>\n
Valais Canton police commander Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gisler said during a news conference that work is underway to identify the victims and inform their families, adding that the community is \u201cdevastated.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thirteen of the wounded were Italian citizens, and six more Italians remained unaccounted for, Italy\u2019s ambassador to Switzerland, Gian Lorenzo Cornado, told state-run RAI television.<\/p>\n
Beatrice Pilloud, Valais Canton\u2019s attorney general, said it was too early to determine the cause of the fire. Experts have not yet been able to go inside the wreckage.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt no moment is there a question of any kind of attack,\u201d Pilloud said.<\/p>\n
She later said the number of people who were in the bar is \u201ccurrently totally unknown,\u201d adding that its maximum capacity will be part of the investigation.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the time being, we don\u2019t have any suspect,\u201d she added, when asked whether anyone had been arrested in the fire. \u201cAn investigation has been opened, not against anyone, but to illuminate the circumstances of this dramatic fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gisler said the priority until further notice would be identifying the victims, adding that \u201cthis work will have to take several days.\u201d<\/p>\n
An evening of celebration turns tragic<\/b><\/p>\n
Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris who survived the blaze, described \u201ctotal chaos\u201d inside the bar. One of his friends died and \u201ctwo or three\u201d were missing, he said.<\/p>\n
Axel said he did not the fire start, but he did see waitresses arrive with Champagne bottles with sparklers.<\/p>\n
He described feeling like he was suffocating, saying he initially hid behind a table, then ran upstairs and tried to use a table to break a Plexiglas window. It fell out of its casing, allowing him to escape.<\/p>\n
Axel lost his jacket, shoes, phone and bank card while fleeing, but \u201cI am still alive and it\u2019s just stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m still in shock,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV that they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lighted candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they said.<\/p>\n
One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from a basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door.<\/p>\n
Another witness speaking to BFMTV described people smashing windows to escape the blaze, some gravely injured, and panicked parents rushing to the scene in cars to see whether their children were trapped inside. The young man said he saw about 20 people scrambling to flee the smoke and flames and likened what he saw to a horror movie as he watched from across the street.<\/p>\n
One of the people unaccounted for is an Italian, Giovanni Tamburi, whose mother Carla Masielli issued an appeal for any news about her son and asked the media to show his photo in hopes of identifying him, according to RAI.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have called all the hospitals, but they don\u2019t give me any news. We don\u2019t know if he\u2019s among the dead. We don\u2019t know if he\u2019s among the missing,\u201d she wailed. \u201cThey don\u2019t tell us anything!\u201d<\/p>\n
The injured were so numerous that the intensive care unit and operating theater at the regional hospital quickly reached full capacity, said Mathias Reynard, head of the regional government of the Valais Canton.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis evening should have been a moment of celebration and coming together, but it turned into a nightmare,\u201d Reynard said.<\/p>\n
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani was planning to go to the site on Friday, given the significant number of Italians involved.<\/p>\n
Three of the wounded were being transported from the Sion hospital in Switzerland to Milan\u2019s Niguarda, the Italian civil protection agency said.<\/p>\n
Resort town sits in the heart of the Alps<\/b><\/p>\n
In a region busy with tourists skiing on its slopes, authorities have called on people to show caution in the coming days to avoid any accidents that could require medical resources that are already overwhelmed.<\/p>\n
With high-altitude ski runs rising nearly 9,850 feet in the heart of the Valais region\u2019s snowy peaks and pine forests, Crans-Montana is one of the top venues on the World Cup circuit. The town\u2019s Crans-sur-Sierre golf club stages the European Masters each August on a picturesque course.<\/p>\n
Swiss President Guy Parmelin, speaking on his first day in office, said many emergency staffers had been \u201cconfronted by scenes of indescribable violence and distress.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis Thursday must be the time of prayer, unity and dignity,\u201d he said. \u201cSwitzerland is a strong country not because it is sheltered from drama, but because it knows how to face them with courage and a spirit of mutual help.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keaten, Dazio and Leicester write for the Associated Press. Dazio reported from Berlin and Leicester reported from Paris. AP writers Geir Moulson in Berlin and Graham Dunbar in Geneva contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland\u00a0\u2014\u00a0About 40 people were killed and 115 others injured, most of them seriously, after a fire ripped…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":485836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[19958,45526,7335,1582,276,2385,219551,28712,5025,2961,146912,224,5337,219553,3546,6280,219550,219552,16997,7307],"class_list":{"0":"post-485835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-bar","9":"tag-berlin","10":"tag-blaze","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-day","14":"tag-dazio","15":"tag-dozen","16":"tag-fire","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-leicester","19":"tag-los-angeles","20":"tag-losangeles","21":"tag-new-year-celebration","22":"tag-people","23":"tag-region","24":"tag-regional-government","25":"tag-swiss-alpine-resort","26":"tag-switzerland","27":"tag-victim"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115822512443831371","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}