Switzerland: Massive rock fall just missed the mountain village of Brienz

“Great Luck”
Huge rock fall: The Swiss mountain village of Brienz is just missed

The landslide near Brienz in Switzerland, which had been expected for weeks, happened overnight with a hell of a roar. Huge masses of rock tumbled down the slope and remained just a few meters in front of the old schoolhouse of the mountain village at an altitude of around 1100 meters. A road above the village lies meters high under rubble, said Christian Gartmann, spokesman for the municipality of Albula, to which Brienz belongs. The landslide happened between 11 p.m. and midnight. It was very loud in the whole valley. The municipality’s crisis team met twice during the night and evaluated the first photos at dawn. “Brienz was very lucky,” Gartmann told SRF. “We are not assuming at the moment that there was any damage.”

Whether the residential buildings and the church have really been completely spared should be checked during a helicopter flight during the day. “Sometimes in such events, boulders crash into other boulders. Then there are splinter stones from the size of a fist to a soccer ball,” said Gartmann. They could shoot hundreds of meters through the air “like a cannonball” and damage window panes or other parts of the building.

Village of Brienz evacuated – only cameras in place

Brienz in the canton of Graubünden, around 25 kilometers southwest of Davos as the crow flies, has been closed for weeks. Nobody stays there. Only installed cameras recorded what was happening 24/7. Huge boulders had already fallen on Wednesday. At first glance, everything remained lying on meadows in front of the village.

Before and after pictures now show the massive changes in the landscape. The day before, there were still bare rocks, single boulders, light and dark rock and meadow, trees and a wooden hut in the area. On Friday everything was buried under a huge mountain of gray rubble. The village looks like a miniature complex in comparison to the pictures.

As a precaution, roads and railway lines were closed below the village. Train traffic to the resort of St. Moritz will be diverted because the route between Tiefencastel and Filisur is closed, as a spokesman for the Rhaetian Railway said. The 6th stage start of the Tour de Suisse bicycle race had to be moved from La Pont to Chur on Friday.

Berg near Brienz has been in motion for thousands of years

Unlike the recent landslide in the Austrian Tyrol, climate change is not the trigger in Brienz. Elsewhere, it is causing permafrost, the ice that holds rocks together at high altitudes like glue, to melt. Around 100,000 cubic meters fell in Tyrol last Sunday. Hundreds of meters of the southern summit of the Flughorn massif, including the summit cross, broke off. The rock material landed far away from inhabited areas and endangered no one.

But according to experts, the mountain above Brienz has been in motion for thousands of years. The landslide had accelerated over the years. This week, the rock masses were already sliding at a speed of 40 meters per day. When the situation became too critical in the spring, the municipality decided to bring around 80 residents to safety. They have been staying with relatives or in holiday apartments in the region since mid-May.

In Brienz, geologists expected two million cubic meters of rock to slide, 20 times as much as in Tyrol. How much of it came down during the night could not be estimated on Friday. It was also unclear whether rock would continue to slide in the direction of the village. “We are currently assuming that this was unfortunately not all,” said community spokesman Gartmann. It was therefore not foreseeable when people would be able to return to the village.

bw / Christiane Oelrich
DPA