The storms made it difficult on Monday to search for more than a dozen hikers who remained missing for a day after a large piece of an alpine glacier in Italy broke, sending an avalanche of ice, snow and rocks down the slope. . Officials put the known number of deaths at seven.
“I hope the figures stop here,” said Veneto Governor Luca Zaia, whose region in northeastern Italy borders the Dolomite Mountains, including the Marmolada Glacier. He spoke in the tourist resort of Canazei, where a morgue was set up on the ice rink.
Another regional leader, Maurizio Fugatti, said 14 people were missing on Monday afternoon: 10 Italians, three from the Czech Republic and one from Austria. “Families contacted us because these people did not return home,” said Fugatti, of the Trentino-Alto Adige alpine region.
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There were four cars left in the mountain car park whose occupants had not been located: two cars were registered in the Czech Republic, one in Germany and the fourth in Hungary.
Fugatti raised the possibility that there are people whose families do not know their status as they could be on holiday and only register with relatives at the end of the holidays.
At least three of the dead were Italians, authorities said. Italian news said one of the dead was from the Czech Republic, which is better known in English as the Czech Republic.
On Sunday, officials said nine people were injured, but officials at a news conference Monday in the resort town of Canazei said there were eight people, including two hospitalized in what they described as a “delicate” condition and hard.
Zaia said among those hospitalized were two Germans and a 40-year-old patient yet to be identified.
The avalanche fell roaring as dozens of hikers made excursions, some of them stuck together.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, flanking officials after meeting with relatives of some of the dead, expressed “the most sincere, affectionate and sincere closeness” to the families.
This undated image published on Sunday, July 3, 2022 by the Italian National Alpine and Cave Rescue Corps shows the type of rescue helicopters used on the glacier of the Italian Alps near Trento, where it has broken a large piece of ice. Corpo Nacional Soccorso Alpino i Speleologico via AP
With a sad look, he demanded that steps be taken to prevent this tragedy from happening again. “This is a drama that certainly has a certain unpredictability,” Draghi said, echoing several experts who said an avalanche caused by a glacier rupture could not be predicted.
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But what happened “certainly depends on the environmental deterioration and the climate situation,” the prime minister said.
The Marmolada glacier has been shrinking for decades and scientists at the CNR government research center have said it will not exist in 25-30 years.
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“Today, Italy is approaching” around the affected families, Draghi said. “The government needs to reflect on what has happened and take action, so that what happens has very little, if any, chance of repeating itself.”
The separate portion of the glacier was massive, estimated at 200 meters wide, 80 meters high and 60 meters deep. Zaia compared the avalanche to a “block of ice the size of an apartment building with rubble and mass cyclops of rock.”
“I can’t say anything more than the facts, and the facts tell us that high temperatures don’t favor these situations,” Zaia told reporters.
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Italy is facing a week-long heat wave, and alpine rescuers said the temperature at the glacier altitude last week exceeded 10 ° C (50 ° F) when it normally should. of overcoming freezing at this time of year.
The drones were used to help search for any of the missing and verify safety, but they even had to stop working when storms hit the area late in the morning.
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It was not immediately known what caused a pinnacle of the glacier to break and thunder down the slope at an expert-estimated speed of about 300 km / h (about 200 mph).
But high temperatures were widely cited as a likely factor.
This undated image published on Monday, July 4, 2022 by the Glaciological Commission of the Society of Tridentine Mountaineers shows the Fedaia Glacier in the Italian Alps, near Trento, before a large chunk fell off on Sunday, killing at least seven hikers and injuring eight more. Cristian Ferrari / Commission Glaciologica Società Alpinisti Tridentini via AP
Jacopo Gabrieli, a polar science researcher at Italy’s CNR state research center, noted that the long heat wave, which spanned May and June, was the hottest in northern Italy during that period for nearly 20 years. years.
“It’s absolutely an anomaly,” Gabrieli said in an interview on Italian state television on Monday. Like other experts, he said it would have been impossible to predict when or if a serac – a pinnacle of the cantilever of a glacier – could break, as it did on Sunday.
Rustic shelter operators on the mountain side said temperatures at 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) recently reached 24 ° C (75 ° F), something unheard of in a place where hikers go in the summer. to stay cool.
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The glacier, in the Marmolada range, is the largest of the Dolomites in northeastern Italy. People ski there in the winter. But the glacier has been melting rapidly over the past few decades, with much of its volume gone.
The Mediterranean basin, which includes southern European countries such as Italy, has been identified by UN experts as a “hot spot of climate change”, likely to suffer from heat waves and water shortages, among other consequences.
Pope Francis, who has made caring for the planet a priority for his papacy, tweeted an invitation to pray for the victims of the avalanche and their families.
“The tragedies we are experiencing with climate change must push us to urgently seek new ways that are respectful of people and nature,” Francis wrote.
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