Skiers and travelers heading to or from the Alps by car are advised to be particularly careful. Extreme weather and heavy snowfall are causing landslides and avalanches in France, Switzerland and Italy. A 16-year-old boy was killed in South Tyrol.
Bron: RAI, DH, The GuardianVandaag om 17:25
The lifeless body of Markus Raffl was found on Sunday evening in the Pfelders ski area in South Tyrol, not far from the Austrian border. Perhaps he was buried under snow in an avalanche in the morning. According to the Italian public television channel RAI, the teenager had taken one of the last gondola lifts before the slopes were closed due to the avalanche risk. His parents raised the alarm when he did not return in the evening, after which a search was launched. Rescue workers managed to locate the young man around 9 p.m. and remove him from the snow, but no further help could be obtained for the victim.
The north of Italy is experiencing extreme weather, heavy rainfall, strong winds and avalanches, reports the ANSA news agency. Cyclone Fedra mainly rages in the north of the country. Code orange applies in two regions, Emilia Romagna and Piedmont. Code yellow is in force in thirty other regions, including Lombardy, Tuscany, Umbria, Veneto, Sardinia and Sicily.
In the northwestern Alpine region of Val d’Aosta, near the French border, more than 6,000 people were isolated as a result of avalanches, including several Flemish people. Access roads to the ski village of Gressoney were blocked by the snow. “We were completely cut off from the outside world here, but we have now been told that the road has been cleared again,” Ghent entrepreneur Pieter De Malsche told our editors on Monday afternoon. Further south in the coastal region of Liguria, landslides were reported in and around Genoa.
There is also an increased risk of avalanches elsewhere in the Alps, after a lot of fresh snow has fallen in recent days and hours. In a few hours, fifty to one hundred centimeters of white powder fell in some places.
Two dead in Switzerland
In Switzerland, several people were buried under snow in avalanches last weekend, and two skiers were killed in Davos and Saas-Grund. The Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research rates the avalanche danger at level 4, where the risk of avalanches is high. Météo France also warns of a “high avalanche risk” in the Alps in France. Skiers and snowboarders are advised not to venture off the slopes.