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The church tower is crooked, the houses have deep cracks and the road to the village is no longer asphalted because the road surface kept cracking open. Brienz in the Albulatal in Graubünden loses the ground under his feet. Slide towards the valley. One meter per year. That’s way too much, but less than it already is.
Now the mountain also has a fever. Part of the slope, the “island”, goes down, now up to 32 meters per year. In March, the crowd moved much faster again. From early summer it could turn into a landslide, according to the information bulletin at the beginning of the week.
In the worst-case scenario, 56 million cubic meters of rock from Piz Linard will fall on the village – fourteen times as much as Bondo GR in 2017. The masses of debris would bury Brienz and work their way down the valley to Tiefencastel.
Prepare for evacuation
One resident told the newspaper “Südostschweiz”: “Every day we see what comes down there, and for the past two or three weeks it has been extreme. Anyone who says they are not afraid is lying.” The rumbling has increased enormously in the last two weeks, says a second resident. “Often at night.”
The Bulletin emphasizes that while a major rockfall event is unlikely, it can no longer be ruled out. The population must prepare for the evacuation. More information will follow next Thursday.
The protection of Brienz in the Romansh Brinzauls has so far cost 68 million francs. A new underground drainage tunnel has calmed the ground beneath the village.
About 300 apartments would be affected
But one is not immune to the mountain: technology is against nature, David against Goliath. And Brienz is running out of time. Since 2021, there is therefore also a different scenario: that of resettlement. The canton of Graubünden has commissioned a corresponding study in 2021 for half a million Swiss francs.
72 residents and about 50 guests would have to move, in extreme cases about 300 apartments would be affected. It would be the largest resettlement campaign in Switzerland. The last resort for Brienz.
But maybe soon the only one. The village has been moving for as long as anyone can remember, only in the last 20 years has the landslide accelerated significantly. There are indications that climate change contributes to this.
A move has already taken place in Horlaui LU
The Swiss mountain regions are particularly hard hit by this. The reasons include rising temperatures: glaciers are retreating, permafrost is beginning to melt. Our mountains are becoming more unstable. According to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the increase of natural hazards in mountain areas, resettlement is becoming inevitable in some places. Such scenarios are not only discussed in Brienz, but also in Bondo GR and Guttannen BE.
We are still working on very extensive clarifications, says Christian Gartmann, who is responsible for communications. There will also be new information on resettlement on Thursday and more detailed information in mid-May.
A Swiss precedent is the Horlaui area in the municipality of Weggis in Lucerne. In 2014, the largest preventive resettlement campaign to date took place there due to environmental hazards. The municipality at the foot of the Rigi was repeatedly hit by stone chips and mudslides. Studies showed that the rocks could break off at any time and fatally injure residents. Five houses were evacuated and demolished. Ten residents lost their homes.
In the Horlaui case, there were long legal disputes: those affected demanded higher compensation or complained about the demolition. Because the Laugneri area, just a few hundred meters away, was protected with ten million Swiss francs. According to studies, a rescue was technically feasible and economically viable. The federal court rejected both appeals.
4100 square kilometers threatened by landslides
When do you save a village? When do you leave it to his fate? In Brienz’s case, these questions are more relevant than ever.
The Federal Environment Agency has calculated for SRF that about 4,100 square kilometers across Switzerland are at risk from landslides – ten percent of Switzerland, an area of 160,000 buildings, 2.5 times the size of the canton of Zurich. Most of these areas do not move or move only a few centimeters per year.
37 buildings moved more than 200 meters
But Brienz slides very fast. There was only one comparable case in the foothills of the Alps in Freiburg: in 1994, a mass of mud, rocks and wood slid down the mountain and completely destroyed the holiday resort of Falli-Hölli. In the end, some of the settlement’s 37 buildings were more than 200 meters from their original locations. Falli-Hölli is considered to be the “largest slide in an inhabited area in Europe”. In one year, a total of 30 million cubic meters of material came off the mountain.
Since the Falli-Hölli slide, climate change has accelerated significantly. So Brienz could be the start of something bigger.
What is the threat to the village? Should the citizens of Brienz leave or should they stay? They will know more next Thursday.
Source:Blick
I am Liam Livingstone and I work in a news website. My main job is to write articles for the 24 Instant News. My specialty is covering politics and current affairs, which I’m passionate about. I have worked in this field for more than 5 years now and it’s been an amazing journey. With each passing day, my knowledge increases as well as my experience of the world we live in today.
