Rebuilding was never in doubt.
The melting glacier collapsed on a Wednesday in May, a cascade of rocks, ice and water that buried recently evacuated homes and farms in the village of Blatten. It lasted half a minute. By the beginning of the following week, authorities were already drawing up plans for a new village in the same valley, with the threats of a warming world still present in the surrounding Alps.
Blatten had about 300 inhabitants before the disaster; some families had been there for hundreds of years. Authorities still don’t know exactly where the new village will be built. But they estimate it will cost Swiss taxpayers more than $100 million. Disaster insurance payments are expected to add another 400 million for reconstruction.
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It’s a high-altitude example of the financial and emotional damage Europe is suffering from climate change.
Months after the catastrophe, residents and authorities in the Lötschental Valley still face doubts. How quickly can the government streamline bureaucracy to build new homes? How many residents will rebuild their lives in the new Blatten? And how will they deal with the dangers of the glacier that rests on the ruins of the village like a dying dragon, still melting, still moving, still making safety in the valley uncertain?
What local leaders — and all the residents I spoke to on a recent visit to the valley — don’t question is whether residents should leave the mountains. This would be an existential question, for Swiss identity and for the occupation of the Alps.
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“Our soul is here,” said Daniel Ritler, a lifelong Blatten resident who lost his home, his large farm and the rooms he rented to tourists. “It was our paradise.”
The reconstruction effort is led by Franziska Biner, head of the energy and finance department in the Swiss canton of Valais, where Blatten is located. “We can’t say that everyone needs to leave dangerous places,” he explained in an interview, “because then we would have to leave the entire canton.”
Researchers have long warned of the growing dangers that climate change, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, poses to people and property in mountainous areas like the Alps.
Swiss researchers say the country has warmed twice as fast as the global average. Higher temperatures are thawing permafrost, which acts like glue on slopes, increasing the risk of landslides and rockfalls that can be fatal.
Warming also reduces good snow days at ski resorts, affecting tourism revenue, which is vital to many Alpine economies. (The relative lack of snow should also lessen avalanche damage in the coming decades, but few in Switzerland celebrate this tradeoff.)
In recent years, no warming effects have affected the Alps as dramatically as the loss of glaciers. Scientists found that Swiss glaciers lost more than 40% of their ice volume between 1980 and 2016. They lost another 10% in just two years, 2022 and 2023. Austria and France had similar retreats. In Valais alone, 80 glaciers are classified as potentially dangerous to people or property.
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Deteriorating glaciers can collapse quickly, as Blatten residents learned in May.
The Birch Glacier has dominated the peaks above the village for as long as people have lived in the Lötschental. But it was melting, as was the permafrost above it. Rockfalls pressed against the glacier. Researchers monitored signs of danger. Last spring, they saw them — and quickly evacuated the village.
A few days later, Lars Gustke, who operates a cable car on the other side of the valley, watched in horror as the glacier above Blatten collapsed. The ice and parts of the mountain it swept away destroyed homes and blocked the river at the bottom of the valley, quickly forming a small lake that flooded other buildings.
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Nicole Kalbermatten and Lilian Ritler — distant cousin of Daniel Ritler; Blatten is full of Ritlers — they worked that day at Lötschental Marketing AG, the valley’s tourism body, with an office under the cable car station. The lights flickered, went out, and came back on, and Lilian Ritler opened a window. A pressure wave hit the building, caused by the glacier moving down the mountain. Ritler ran to find Kalbermatten, her best friend from the village.
“Blatten,” she said, “it’s over.”
The three hotels that hosted skiers and hikers disappeared. The barns in the oldest part of the village have disappeared. The community oven where residents baked bread disappeared.
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Only one resident died, thanks to early warning and evacuation. The homeless went to friends’ homes in neighboring villages or to empty vacation homes offered by strangers nearby. Then they regretted it. “You don’t just lose the house,” Ritler said. “You lose the streets, the church and your childhood.”
But the village is not lost, at least in name. The Swiss authorities are committed to this.
Biner and his colleagues on the council that governs the canton decided a week after the collapse that reconstruction was necessary. They presented a plan in September to do it in five years — with the first residents returning to new homes next year. They quickly raised around 75 million dollars in donations from private individuals, NGOs and government agencies. The state promised about 125 million. Insurers must pay another 400 million.
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“The new Blatten will be a different Blatten. The memories were evacuated along with the people,” Mayor Matthias Bellwald said in an interview at the end of the road leading to the village. “It will certainly be a modern village. It will be a beautiful village.”
It could take years for the full picture of the risks to the new village to become clear.
Displaced residents who returned to the destroyed village, still buried and flooded, describe the experience as traumatic. They also suffered economic losses. The disaster has hampered the valley’s summer tourist season and will likely affect winter income in neighboring villages where many former Blatten residents work. Residents debate whether to move to the new Blatten or stay where they are. Few consider leaving the mountains for good.
Daniel Ritler and his wife, Karin, considered moving away from the Alps. But they decided to stay — not in the new Blatten, but in a nearby village, where they are renovating an old hotel, part of an effort to revive local tourism.
They recognize the risks of life in the valley, Ritler said, but the Alps are too deeply embedded in his life for him to abandon them.
“I said to Karin: ‘If you’re afraid, we need to talk about this,’” he said. “For me, that’s not a problem.”
“We have to respect nature”, he continued. “We’re lucky to have been evacuated. And we’re lucky to be healthy and have two hands. And with those two hands, we want to achieve something.”
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