Swiss investigators are racing to identify the victims of a fire that tore through a crowded bar, killing about 40 people and injuring 115 who were celebrating at a New Year’s Eve party in the Alpine ski resort of Crans-Montana.
President Guy Parmelin has said the country will hold five days of mourning, describing the blaze as one of the most traumatic events in Switzerland’s history. “It was a drama of an unknown scale,” he said, paying tribute to the many “young lives that were lost and interrupted”.
Switzerland owed it to those young people, who had their “projects, hopes and dreams” cut short, to ensure such a tragedy never happened again, said the president.
The fire broke out at 1.30am on Thursday in the town’s Le Constellation bar, but it’s not yet clear what set off the blaze. Some witnesses said it started after sparklers or flares were put into champagne bottles.
Two women told the French broadcaster BFMTV they had been inside when they saw a bartender carrying a female member of staff on his shoulders. She was holding a lit birthday candle on top of a bottle that set fire to the wooden ceiling. The flames spread quickly and caused the ceiling to collapse, they said.
Witnesses said the flames set fire to the ceiling, and within seconds the blaze had spread, engulfing a crowded basement packed with revellers. Many were teenagers. One of the women described a crowd surge as people tried desperately to escape up a narrow flight of stairs.
Swiss police warned it could take days or even weeks to identify everyone who died in the disaster. The exact number of people who were at the bar when it went up in flames remains unclear, and police have not specified how many are still missing.
The canton’s chief prosecutor, Beatrice Pilloud, said significant resources have been deployed “to identify the victims and return their bodies to the families as quickly as possible”.
Pilloud said she could not comment on reports that lighted candles had caused the inferno. “An investigation is taking place. It will identify the exact circumstances of what happened,” she said, adding that it would look into whether the bar met safety standards and had the required number of exits.
Hundreds gathered in silence in the freezing cold on Thursday evening, laying flowers and lighting candles. Many at the night-time vigil knew people who remain unaccounted for, or were badly injured.
Ulysse Brozzo, 16, an instructor at a local ski school, said earlier in the day that several of his friends were in the club at the time.
He said he had spoken to some who were safe, but had yet to hear from others he knew were inside when the fire broke out. A friend of a friend was in a coma at Sion hospital. “It’s a total tragedy,” he said. “There were hundreds of people inside.”
Parmelin – speaking in his first day in the job as Switzerland’s new head of state – said some of those who survived were “severely injured”. They had suffered serious burns, as well as damage to their lungs.
The injured were dispatched to hospitals in Sion, Lausanne, Geneva and Zurich, and others transported to neighbouring countries. The European Union said it has been in contact with Swiss authorities about providing medical assistance, while the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said some of the injured were being cared for in French hospitals.
Some of those caught up in the fire were visiting the ski resort from neighbouring countries. Italy’s foreign ministry said 16 of its nationals were missing and 12 were among the injured. France said eight of its citizens were missing and it could not rule out that French nationals were among the dead. One Australian was among the injured.
Crans-Montana is a bustling resort town of about 10,000 people perched high in the Valais canton of the Swiss Alps, with a view across the valley to the famed Matterhorn mountain. Unlike nearby Verbier, which attracts a wealthy anglophone crowd, Crans-Montana is popular mainly with wealthy Europeans.
Brozzo said the venue was set over two floors, with a bar on the main floor and narrow stairs leading to a basement nightclub below, where he speculated it would have been possible for people to have become trapped and incapacitated from smoke inhalation.
Speaking on Thursday morning, Mathias Reynard, the president of the Valais canton, said what should have been a moment of celebration “turned into a nightmare”. He said he was devastated by the tragedy. “I can’t hide from you that we are all shaken by what happened overnight in Crans,” he told a press conference.
Le Constellation opened in 2015 and could accommodate up to 300 people inside, with room for a further 40 on a heated terrace, French media reported.
The owner of the Dédé clothing store, directly across the street from Le Constellation, said the venue was a popular destination for younger people – including the children of her friends, who would often drink there from as young as 14 years old.
François, 17, a ski instructor who said he had often partied at the bar, said new year parties were known as being more lax in terms of checking the age of bar entrants.
The town relies heavily on a largely European clientele who come to ski, eat in the Michelin-starred restaurants and shop at Moncler and Louis Vuitton stores. It has about 3,000 hotel rooms and 10,000 residents.
In a region busy with tourists skiing on the slopes, the authorities have called on people to show caution in the coming days. They urged them to avoid any accidents that could require medical resources that are already overwhelmed.
