At least six people died and 9 were injured in the avalanche of ice, snow and large rocks that thundered down the mountainside topped by the Marmolada Glacier on Sunday afternoon. Trento prosecutor Sandro Raimondi said 17 hikers were believed to be missing, Italian news agency LaPresse reported. Veneto regional governor Luca Zaia said some of those hiking in the region on Sunday were dragged along by rope as they climbed.
Very dangerous conditions for rescuers
The nationalities of the known dead have not been released and conditions were too dangerous on Monday morning for rescue teams with dogs to continue searching for the missing or to retrieve the bodies. The bodies will be taken to an ice rink in the resort of Canazei in the Dolomites for identification. Raimondi is quoted as saying that two of the nine wounded are German. Zaia told reporters that one of the Germans was a 65-year-old man. Of the injured, one of those hospitalized in intensive care has not yet been identified. This view taken on Monday shows the glacier that collapsed the day before. (Pierre Teyssot/AFP/Getty Images) The patients suffered chest and skull injuries, Zaia said. Drones were used to locate any of the missing as well as verify security. Sixteen cars remained unaccounted for in the area’s parking lot, and authorities tried to locate the occupants through license plates. It was not clear how many of the cars may have belonged to the already identified victims or the injured, who were airlifted to hospitals on Sunday.
The collapse is estimated at 300 km/h
Prime Minister Mario Draghi and the head of the National Civil Protection Service were expected to travel on Monday to Canazei, a tourist town in the Dolomites that has served as a base for rescuers. What caused a peak of the glacier to break off and slide down the slope at a speed estimated by experts at about 300 km/h was not immediately known. But the heat wave that has hit Italy since May, bringing temperatures unusually high for the start of summer even in the normally cooler Alps, was cited as a possible factor. Jacopo Gabrieli, a polar science researcher at Italy’s state-run research center CNR, noted that the long heat wave, spanning May and June, was the hottest in northern Italy at that time for almost 20 years. “It is absolutely an anomaly,” Gabrieli said in an interview on Italian state television on Monday. Like other experts, he said it would be impossible to predict when or if a serac — a peak from the outcrop of a glacier — might break off, as it did on Sunday. Alpine rescuers on Sunday noted that at the end of last week, the temperature at the 3,300-meter summit had exceeded 10 degrees Celsius, far higher than usual. Managers of rustic lodges along the mountainside said temperatures at 2,000 meters recently reached 24 degrees Celsius, an unprecedented heat in a place where hikers go in the summer to cool off. The glacier, in the Marmolada range, is the largest in the Dolomites mountains in northeastern Italy. People ski in this winter. But the glacier has been melting rapidly in recent decades, with much of its volume gone. Experts from the CNR research center, which has a polar science institute, estimated a few years ago that the glacier will no longer exist within 25 to 30 years. The Mediterranean basin, which includes southern European countries such as Italy, has been labeled by UN experts as a “climate change hotspot”, likely to suffer heat waves and water shortages, among other consequences.
