ROME –
Thunderstorms on Monday hampered the search for more than a dozen hikers who were missing for a day after a large chunk of an alpine glacier in Italy calved, sending an avalanche of ice, snow and rock down the slope. Authorities put the known death toll at seven.
“I hope the numbers stop here,” said Veneto Governor Luca Zaia, whose region in northeastern Italy borders the Dolomites mountain range, including the Marmolada glacier. He spoke in the tourist town of Canazei, where a morgue has been set up at the ice rink.
Another regional leader, Maurizio Fugatti, said 14 people were still missing as of Monday afternoon: 10 Italians, three from the Czech Republic and one from Austria. “We were contacted by families because these people did not return home,” said Fugatti from the alpine region of Trentino-Alto Adige.
In the parking lot on the mountain, four cars remained whose occupants had not been traced: two cars had license plates from the Czech Republic, one from Germany and the fourth from Hungary.
Fugatti raised the possibility that there are people whose families do not know their status, as they could be on vacation and only contact relatives at the end of the vacation.
At least three of the dead were Italian, authorities said. Italian news reports said one of the deceased was from the Czech Republic, which is better known in English as the Czech Republic.
Authorities on Sunday said nine people were injured, but officials at a Monday news conference in the resort town of Canazei said there were eight people, including two hospitalized in what they described as a “delicate” and serious condition.
Zaia said that among those hospitalized were two Germans and a 40-year-old patient yet to be identified.
The avalanche broke out with a bang as dozens of hikers were out hiking, including some tied up with ropes.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, flanking officials after meeting relatives of some of the dead, expressed “the most sincere, affectionate and heartfelt closeness” to the families.
Looking somber, he demanded that measures be taken so that such a tragedy does not happen again. “This is a drama that certainly has some unpredictability,” Draghi said, echoing several experts who said an avalanche triggered by a glacial break could not be forecast.
But what happened “certainly depends on the environmental deterioration and the climatic situation,” the prime minister said.
The Marmolada Glacier has been shrinking for decades, and scientists at the government research center CNR have said it will be gone in 25 to 30 years.
“Today, Italy gathers closely” around the affected families, Draghi said. “The government must reflect on what happened and take measures, so that what happens has little or no chance of being repeated.”
The calved portion of the glacier was huge, estimated to be 200 meters (yards) wide, 80 meters high and 60 meters deep. Zaia compared the avalanche to a “block of ice (the size) of an apartment building with debris and cyclopean masses of rock.”
“I can’t say anything other than the facts, and the facts tell us that high temperatures don’t favor these situations,” Zaia told reporters.
Italy is in the midst of a weeks-long heat wave, and alpine rescuers said the temperature at the glacier’s altitude last week exceeded 10 C (50 F) when it normally should be below freezing in this time of year.
Drones were being used to help search for any of the missing and check security, but even they had to stop operating when thunderstorms hit the area in the late morning.
It was not immediately known what caused a pinnacle of the glacier to break off and thunder down the slope at a speed estimated by experts to be around 300 kph (nearly 200 mph).
But high temperatures were widely cited as a likely factor.
Jacopo Gabrieli, a polar sciences researcher at Italy’s state research center CNR, noted that the long heat wave, which lasted from May to June, was the hottest in northern Italy in that period for almost 20 years.
“It is 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 a glacier ledge, might break off, as it did on Sunday.
Operators of rustic lodges along the mountainside said temperatures at the 6,600-foot (2,000-meter) level recently reached 75 F (24 C), unheard of in a place where hikers go in the summer to cool off. .
The glacier, in the Marmolada mountain range, is the largest of the Dolomite mountains in northeastern Italy. People ski on it in winter. But the glacier has been melting rapidly in recent decades, and much of its volume has disappeared.
The Mediterranean basin, which includes southern European countries such as Italy, has been identified by UN experts as a “climate change hotspot”, prone to heat waves and water shortages, among other consequences.
Pope Francis, who has made caring for the planet a priority of his papacy, tweeted an invitation to pray for the avalanche victims 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.