Rome-Search for more than 12 hikers who remained unknown for a day after a thunderstorm collapsed a huge mass of Italian Alpine glaciers on Monday Hindered. Ice, snow and rock avalanches are down the slope. Italy's state television said another body had been recovered, increasing the known death to seven.
On Sunday afternoon, while dozens of hikers were on an excursion, nine others were injured when the avalanche was unleashed from the Marmolada Glacier.
Trent's prosecutor Sandro Raimondi was initially believed to be missing 17 hikers, the Italian news agency La Presse reported. But then RAI state television reported from the scene that the unexplained number had dropped to 15 after authorities were able to track some of the people fearing missing.
By Monday afternoon, at least four bodies had been identified at the morgue at the Kanazei ice skating rink, a resort town in the Dolomite Mountains.
RAI said the three identified were Italian, including an experienced Alpine guide who led a group of hikers. The other was a hiker, whose relatives said he sent a selfie from the slope just before the avalanche barreled down.
One of the dead was from the Czech Republic, RAI said.
According to media reports, three Romanians, one French national, one Austrian, and four Czech Italians are at risk of disappearance. included.
Governor Luca Zaia of Veneto said that some of the people hiking in the area on Sunday were roped together as they climbed.
Raimondi reportedly stated that two of the injured were German. Zaia told reporters that one of the Germans was a 65-year-old man. Of the patients who were seriously injured, so far it was not possible to identify them.
Hospital survivors suffered chest and skull injuries, Zia said.
Drones were used to look for what was missing and to check for safety.
16 cars remained unclaimed in the parking lot in the area, and authorities attempted to track residents through license plates. The number of cars that may have been owned by the victims or injured already identified was unknown, all of which were taken to the hospital by helicopter on Sunday.
Rescue teams have been melting downhill from glaciers for decades, and the downhill conditions were still too unstable at the beginning of Monday, sending back teams of people and dogs to produce large amounts of debris. He said he couldn't dig deeper.
A thunderstorm diverted a helicopter flying Prime Minister Mario Draghi to the disaster area. It was not clear when he and the head of the National Civil Protection Agency would arrive in Kanazei for a briefing.
It was not immediately clear why the glacier's apex smashed the slope at a speed estimated by experts at 300 km / h and thundered. However, the heat waves that hit Italy since May have been cited as a likely factor that caused unusually high temperatures in the early summer, even in the normally cool Alps.
Jacopo Gabrieli, a polar science researcher at the Italian State CNR Research Center, said the long heat wave from May to June was the hottest in northern Italy for almost 20 years. ..
"It's absolutely unusual," Gabrielli said in an interview on Italian state television on Monday. Like other experts, he said it was impossible to predict when, or when, the apex of shellac from the glacier overhang. — Like Sunday, it can be interrupted.
Sunday's alpine rescue team noticed at the end of last week that the peak temperature at a height of 3,300 meters (11,000 feet) exceeded 10C (50F), much higher. The operator of a rustic shelter along the hillside said temperatures at the level of 2,000 meters (6,600 feet) have recently reached 24 ° C (75 ° F). 40} The glaciers in the Marmolada Mountains are the largest in the Dolomite Mountains in northeastern Italy. People ski on glaciers in winter. However, glaciers have melted rapidly over the past few decades, much of which has been lost. At the Italian State CNR Research Center, where the Institute of Expert Polar Sciences is located, glaciers disappeared within 25 to 30 years, estimated several years ago.
The Mediterranean coastal region, including Southern European countries such as Italy, has been identified by UN experts as a “climate change hotspot” that is likely to be affected by heat waves and water scarcity.
Pope Francis, who made the care of the planet a priority for his Pope, tweeted an invitation to pray for the avalanche victims and their families. "The tragedy we are experiencing in climate change requires urgent search for new ways to respect people and nature," writes Francis.
