At least seven people were killed and nine injured when a huge chunk of the fast-melting glacier on the Marmolada peak in the Dolomites broke off. Rescuers said on Sunday that nine injured people had been found. Trento prosecutor Sandro Raimondi said 17 hikers were believed to be missing, according to a report by Italian news agency LaPresse, and that the death toll could “double or triple.” Veneto president Luca Zaia said some of those hiking in the area on Sunday were roped together as they climbed. The nationalities of the known dead have not yet 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 was quoted as saying that two of the nine wounded were Germans. 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. The patients suffered chest and skull injuries, Zaia said. Sixteen cars remained unaccounted for in the area’s parking lot while authorities tried to locate the owners 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. Rescuers said conditions down the slope from the glacier were still too unstable to immediately send teams of people and dogs to dig through tons of debris. “It is an unimaginable carnage,” a source told Rai News. “Some bodies will only be identified through DNA testing.” Prosecutors opened an investigation against “unknown persons for culpable destruction”. Rescue teams gather at the base of Mount Marmolada in the wake of Sunday’s avalanche. Photo: Andrea Solero/EPA Italy’s prime minister, Mario Draghi, and the head of the national civil protection service were expected to travel on Monday to Canazei, which has served as a base for rescuers. Relatives were also expected to travel into town to identify their loved ones once rescuers could safely remove them from the mountain. What caused a top of the glacier to break off and thunder down the slope at a speed estimated by experts at nearly 300 km/h was not immediately known. However, 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 heatwave, spanning May and June, was the hottest in northern Italy during that period 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 late last week the temperature at the 3,300-meter (11,000-foot) peak had exceeded 10 degrees Celsius, far warmer than usual. Shelter managers along the mountainside said temperatures at 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) recently reached 24 degrees Celsius (75 F), so far unheard of in a place where hikers go in the summer to stay cool. Pope Francis tweeted an invitation to pray for the victims and their families: “The tragedies we are experiencing with climate change must push us to urgently seek new ways to respect people and nature.” The glacier in the Marmolada range is the largest in the Dolomites in northeastern Italy and popular with skiers in winter. But it has been melting rapidly in recent decades, with much of its volume gone. Experts at the CNR research center, which has a polar science institute, estimated a few years ago that the glacier would cease to 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 hot spot”, likely to suffer heatwaves and water shortages among other consequences of the crisis.
