Visit to Brienz: ‘I would have a bad feeling if I spent the night here today’

With its 85 inhabitants, Brienz has probably never been a dynamic village, but on Thursday – a day before the evacuation – it seems depopulated like an open-air museum outside opening hours. There are almost no cars in front of the houses anymore, and the cars that are still there will soon be gone.

The ground under Brienz has always been in motion. Every year it slides one meter deeper into the valley and takes the village with it. Something slides down regularly on the slope behind.

The inhabitants of Brienz are used to the sound of the rubble. You look up, go ahead. And therein lies the biggest challenge: making it clear to them that it is different from what they are used to, that they have to leave now.

Because now the mountain moves faster than the village, namely 10 centimeters per day. A landslide is imminent.

It has been clear since Tuesday: the residents must leave the village by 6 p.m. Friday at the latest. From this point on, the red phase applies, the village may no longer be entered. Because the “island” – the part of the mountain that separates and is 2 million cubic meters in size – will collapse into the valley over the next four to 14 days.

Thursday, when Watson is there, it is still orange phase, which means that the village will be evacuated and can still be entered on request.

There is little life in Brienz. A car with a trailer drives through the village. A man loads a refrigerator onto a pickup truck. Laughter emanates from the church, young restorers and civil protection workers dismantle the 500-year-old grand altar and pack statues. Someone is playing the organ.

You see more media professionals than locals. A German TV crew from SWR stands with its equipment at the fountain in the village square and waits for instructions. Two women peer into the street from the edge of a window or through a glass front door. Your signal: we don’t want to talk to the media.

But there are exceptions. A local waves from afar. He later introduces himself as Renato Liesch. Until recently he renovated a stable in the village. Now he loads groceries onto the passenger seat of his van: flour, sugar, pasta. He says, “You don’t know how long you’ll be gone.”

Liesch is the last of the family still in Brienz. His mother lives in an apartment in Alvaneu and his brother and his girlfriend in Lenzerheide. “My brother warned me, ‘You’re going now!'”

But Liesch does not want to leave before 6 pm on Friday.

Liesch wants to go to the Maiensäss. It is above the slope that slips. There he wants to get by without electricity and water and cook on gas. There are already some gas cylinders upstairs, he says, which he brought up during a hunt last fall.

Now all he has to do is buy beer and cigarettes, fill jerry cans with diesel and withdraw money. He doesn’t know how long he will stay on the Maiensäss.

There are three scenarios. The first is most likely: the rock breaks off into several parts and then probably comes to rest in front of the village. The second scenario is that the goods flow through the valley like viscous honey and reach the village.

And the third scenario, with a 10 percent chance, is that it comes down all at once, up to 200 km/h. Liesch says: “Then there is such a strong pressure wave that the houses no longer have roofs and the church tower ends up on my uncle’s house.”

He says, “When it all comes together, I’ll bury my memories here and make a living somewhere else. But then I leave the valley and go to the Bernese Oberland, Glarnerland, Valais or Voralberg. I could live on the other side of the world, but I have to have mountains.”

Liesch spent his life in Brienz. He points to the left side of the slope. There used to be a forest there, he says, he used to walk there to collect porcini mushrooms. Now there is only gray rubble.

He struggled when the community changed warning levels. When they said: “We are almost phase yellow, get your things”, and a few days later: “it is phase orange, you have to leave the village”. He says, “I had problems there, I had problems there.”

He has tears in his eyes.

From the village square, a man photographs his wife on the balcony. They’ve had this vacation home for thirty years, he says, but they’ve never photographed it.

Ever since they got the apartment, he says, there’s been a rumbling up there on the slope. No one paid much attention to it because it has always been that way. He says: “But now the measurements show you all the possible opportunities. And that’s scary. I would feel uncomfortable staying here tonight. We’re leaving soon.”

The elderly couple is from Bassersdorf in the canton of Zurich and “came up” today to get personal things: photos, jewelery and a wall watch.

That’s all they do. They are not even allowed to turn off the storm, he says, they had specifically asked the municipality, but apparently the infrastructure and the internet will just stay on “until it’s right”.

The insurance company called him yesterday, he says. At first he thought she was asking him to keep everything under control, but the opposite had happened. He says, “They wanted to know if I needed a hotel or help with transportation.”

The home insurance starts if the house is damaged by sudden events such as a landslide, but not by a slow slippage, which in Brienz leads to cracks in the facades.

He says: “Our house doesn’t have any cracks, possibly because it has a basement and is on a concrete slab. But the cracked facades are always shown in the media.”

A police car is coming. The two police officers roll down the windows and say that entry is now prohibited and all outsiders must leave the area.

The man from Zurich asks: “Is it red yet?”

The police officer says, “No, it’s still orange. But no one should stay here who has nothing to do here.”

By that he means media workers. Apparently some of them disturbed the residents during the clean-up and prevented the restorers from their work in the church. Others would have gone from door to door and rang the doorbell.

A no-fly zone has also been declared so that the helicopters can reach the village if necessary, and then not be disturbed by drones.

The Zurich native says, “It’s well organized.”

The policeman says, “It’s predictable, nobody wants to make mistakes.”

The man from Zurich: “And the mailbox is still running?”

The policeman: “Yes, you want people to be able to come and go at any time – at least until Friday night. We were there before, at the mountain, where goods are constantly coming down. It’s a time bomb.”

The other agent: “The mailbox has a radio connection just like us, so we can always call him back if the situation gets worse.”

The agent’s cell phone rings. He says on the phone, “We’re going to lunch now and if anyone’s there after that, there’s the juicy verdicts.” He sticks his tongue out jokingly and is immediately serious again: “But there aren’t many people here. Ah, there’s another media tour in the afternoon? OK. I’ll pass that along.”

20 media professionals from three countries gather in the schoolyard in Tiefencastel and travel by postbus to Brienz. The words “class trip” and “disaster tourism” fall.

Everyone is looking for the right story and eventually comes home with the same thing. Because media manager Christian Gartmann has a fixed program – and clear instructions. He says: “The residents are very stressed. They react allergically to being addressed by outsiders, especially if they are media professionals. I ask you to respect that.”

First everyone is at the foot of the mountain. Gartmann explains the nature of the soil, gives a geological lecture without the diagrams and calls the slope behind him the best controlled mountain in Europe.

Renato Liesch drives on with his van, diesel buses on the loading floor. He swings, as one does in the countryside: arm outstretched, fingers spread, up once, without wagging.

Then comes the mayor, Daniel Albertin. The media representatives learn from him that the scenario of the total destruction of the village does not currently exist. He says: “Otherwise we would have ordered an evacuation and not just any evacuation. Based on what the geologists have shown us, we don’t expect the houses to be destroyed.”

The residents have all found an apartment in the immediate vicinity, he says, and the children can continue to attend the school they attended before the evacuation. They should be gone for at least one to three weeks, but it could be longer. In the meantime, the access roads would be blocked with concrete elements and the village would be monitored with cameras to protect it from looting.

Then Gartman again. He tells the media that a farmer is evacuating his cattle and they could all be there. Actually, the evacuation of livestock is only planned in the red phase. But Albertin is a farmer herself and knows how heartbreaking it can be to leave your animals behind. So he decided with the farmers of Brienz to remove the cattle earlier.

Gartmann says: “I got an e-mail tirade from a woman who only read half the headline and then became concerned about the animals. We’ve always said we’ll only keep her here as long as it’s safe.”

The media workers go as a closed group to the courtyard at the bottom of the village and set up their cameras in the stable. Loading the animals takes a few minutes.

Then the media workers hold the microphones under the farmer’s nose. She stands with her back to the feed fence. And it is hoped, for all involved, that this circus will soon be over.

All local residents, media workers and animals have now left the village. It’s Friday after 6pm. Now only the mountain needs to move.