In less than a minute, more than 90% of village homes and buildings were destroyed by a devastating landslide five months ago in a Swiss village.
Lukas Kalbermatten was overwhelmed his three-generation family-owned hotel was toppled but he didn’t let the emptiness stop him for long.
The hotelier quickly snapped into action and began rebuilding.
“A lot of people were emotional of course, but I didn’t get much too emotional," Kalbermatten said. "I was really realistic and the emotions, they came later after three or four days."
Kalbermatten's response sums up a mindset of many of the 300-odd residents of Blatten: They could have left their bucolic village in the southern Lötschental valley for dead — but instead decided to try to see it come alive again one day, and are taking steps to rebuild.
Authorities evacuated villagers and livestock, but a 64-year-old man was killed as 9 million cubic meters of ice, stone and earth tumbled down from the Kleines Nesthorn peak on May 28. The landslide left a trail about 2-1/2 kilometers (about 1-1/2 miles) wide and 100 meters (about 330 feet) high in places.
If the toll had been higher, locals say, many might not have wanted to return to Blatten.
Kalbermatten, whose website for his Hotel Edelweiss in Blatten shows it half-sunk in a pea-soup-green pond created by the disaster, joined up with other local families to set up a temporary hotel at the summit of a gondola lift in the neighboring village of Wiler — one of three villages in the valley where most Blatten residents relocated.
“For tourism in this valley it’s also a catastrophe because we don’t have enough beds for all the tourists," he said Tuesday. “The most important for us is to do something quickly.”
Laurent Hubert, co-owner of the Nest- und Bietschhorn hotel and restaurant near Blatten, said it was “pulverized” last May. His wife, Esther Bellwald, is spearheading the new hotel with Kalbermatten. Its website said the families of the staff were “all deeply shaken and endlessly sad” after the hotel was destroyed.
“This project is a bit of the light at the end of the tunnel,” Hubert said in knee-deep snow near the construction site, with crews in short sleeves working fast under sunny skies for a planned Dec. 18 opening of the “Momentum” hotel.
A 30-centimeter (12-inch) dump of snowfall over the weekend gave the valley its white wintertime gleam again.
In recent months, work crews have restored electricity and telecom lines to the Blatten area, used backhoes to dig a drainage canal, and cleared high roads that lead to Blatten, allowing for some exiled residents to briefly return to collect some belongings. Some used rowboats to access attics of inundated homes.
Others queued up to claim lost items found by cleanup crews — books, family photos, and heirlooms like a wedding dress.
Manfred Ebener, the construction coordinator in Blatten, said some 400,000 cubic meters of rock and ice remains unstable atop the mountain, making for delicate work in the warmer summer and fall months. The snowfall and cool temperatures have helped solidify the rock and ice overhead, lowering the risks, but frozen ground will make digging harder.
“The movements are declining,” he said on a hillside overlooking the snow-covered mud cone, referring to the shifting geology that set off the landslide. "We are looking at next spring with a bit of concern: The whole process will take place the other way around. When the snow melts, a lot of water gets back into the rock.”
Ebener says several years of clearing work, followed by construction of a new village, should pave the way for inhabitants of Blatten to go back by 2030. In the meantime, the villagers — and much of Switzerland — must brace for a new reality: That global warming may be leaving its trace.
Swiss glaciologists have repeatedly expressed concerns about a thaw in recent years, attributed in large part to global warming, that has accelerated the retreat of glaciers in Switzerland.
“I’m not a scientist. I can’t judge what exactly these climate changes have to do with this event," he said. “But we live here in our valley and we can see that something is happening.”
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