"Mirror Image of Nepal's Disaster"... Why There Was Only One Fatality

[Anchor]

A massive landslide similar to the recent one occurred last year. It happened when a glacier collapsed in the Swiss Alps. However, the casualties at the time were limited to just one death.

Correspondent Kwon Yeongin looks into the reasons why.

[Reporter]

Massive chunks of ice instantly pour down the mountain.

A cloud of dust surges up from the valley as if a major explosion had occurred.

In May of last year, the Birch Glacier collapsed in the Alpine region of Valais, Switzerland.

The landslide triggered a debris flow mixed with melted ice and rocks, and over 6 million tons of debris rushed down to engulf a village at the foot of the mountain.

[Karin Keller-Sutter / Swiss President: The residents of Blatten in Valais are going through a great ordeal. Many things will still be hard to believe. We must give them time to overcome this.]

Nearly 90% of the homes were buried, but out of 400 residents, the casualties were limited to just one death.

This was because authorities discovered that the ground around the glacier was suddenly sinking about ten days before the landslide and urgently evacuated the residents.

There are a total of 1,700 glaciers in the Alpine region.

Much like the Himalayas, the region is being affected by global warming, leading to a sharp rise in glacier collapse landslides and the overflowing of glacial lakes formed by melted glacier water.

Over the past 35 years, glacier collapse landslides in the Alps have been 2.7 times more frequent than those that occurred in the preceding 180 years.

Swiss authorities are observing glacier movement via satellites and constantly monitoring internal glacier noise and water pressure to prepare for collapses and overflows.

[Matthias Huss / Glaciologist at ETH Zurich: Glaciers are developing holes everywhere like Swiss cheese. But those holes are collapsing, which is having a negative impact on the glaciers.]

In particular, on-site observers conducting visual monitoring have also been deployed, with 90 people working just in the canton of Valais.

On-site observers played a major role in detecting early signs of the Birch Glacier collapse last year.

However, despite these preparations, experts say that accurately predicting glacier collapses and glacial lake overflows remains difficult with current technology.

(Video by Lee Seung-hee, Design by Kim Min-young)

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