Glacier Collapse in the Swiss Alps Destroys Most of a Village

A vast section of a glacier broke apart in the Swiss Alps on Wednesday, setting off a landslide of ice, mud and rocks that caused widespread damage to a small village, nine days after its 300 residents had been ordered to evacuate.

At least one person is missing after the village, Blatten, in the Valais Canton in southern Switzerland, was buried beneath debris from the Birch Glacier, Matthias Ebener, a spokesman for the area’s crisis management team, said on Wednesday.

Drone footage and other videos captured the moment that the glacier collapsed sending a large plume of dust down a mountainside. The glacier, covered by about nine million tons of debris, was estimated by a government engineer to have been moving about eight to 11 feet a day toward the valley before the landslide.

Officials said at a news conference on Wednesday that it would take years to recover from the damage, which they were continuing to assess.

“We’ve lost the village, but not the heart,” Matthias Bellwald, the mayor of Blatten, said during the news conference.

Stéphane Ganzer, a state councilor for the Valais Canton, told SRF, the Swiss radio and television broadcasting corporation, on Wednesday that 90 percent of Blatten had been buried.