Terror, shock and disbelief at what happened. In just a few minutes, the New Year’s Eve party at Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montanaa ski resort with 140 kilometers of slopes in the south of Swissbecame a mousetrap engulfed in flames. Hundreds of young people, many of them teenagersthey were trapped inside. “I thought there was a fight, like sometimes happens when people have had too much to drink, but then people started shouting,” Ariel Amar, originally from Geneva, told Australian broadcaster ABC. “It was really shocking to see something like that because it was full of people, many of them very young.”
Authorities continue to investigate the causes of the tragedybut as the hours go by the thesis seems to prevail that the fire was caused by the Christmas sparklers carried by some bottles of champagne. The sparks would have ignited the roof, as explained this Friday Beatrice Pilloudthe chief prosecutor of the county of Valais, where the tourist town is located. “From there the fire spread very quickly,” Pilloud said during a news conference. At least 40 people have died and another 115 were injuredmany of them in critical condition. Among the victims, the majority of Swiss nationality, there are also 14 French, 11 Italians y four serbs, as reported by the authorities. The ID It is being very complicated due to the severity of the burns.
“Las sparks flew to the ceiling and everything caught fire. Within seconds, the entire roof was on fire,” a witness told the British newspaper ‘The Times’. Laetitia Place, 17, managed to escape. “We all saw horrible things that we shouldn’t have seen,” she told Reuters. “There was a small door that everyone was pushing towards. We fell and were piled on top of each other. Some were burning, others were lying dead next to us,” he added, remembering the scenes of intense panic. Some managed to escape by breaking the windows. “I was terrified, for myself, for my friends, for everyone inside.”
Bar for the youngest
The Constellation was a bar with tradition among the youngest. Also teenagers. His usual clientele, as some have described, was between 15 and 30 years old. It had more affordable prices than others, and there was usually no entrance fee. It had a terrace, a ground floor and a basement, where the fire apparently originated. “It’s the bar where we meet our friends almost every weekend,” Mathys, a resident of a neighboring town, told Swiss public television. “We thought it was just a small fire, but when we got there we saw it was like a war scene. He apocalypseif I have to describe it in a single word. “It was terrible.”
Since Thursday, the watches in the vicinity of Le Constellation. Candles, flowers, confusion and immense pain in a town of just over 10,000 inhabitants, very focused on alpine tourism, but where many know each other. “People here are completely shocked”said a journalist from Swiss radio and television. Many families are still looking for their loved ones. In the social networkshave been created groups to try to locate the missing. The injured have been transferred to hospitals in several cities, also outside Switzerland. The severity of the burns complicates the identification of the victims.
“I’ve been looking for my son for 30 hours. The wait is unbearable,” Laetitia, the mother of a 16-year-old teenager, told the French network BFMTV. “If he is in the hospital, I don’t know which hospital he is in. If he is in the morgue, I don’t know which morgue he is in. And if my son is alive, he is alone in the hospital without me being able to be by his side,” he added, reflecting the distress of many families.
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