Snow, avalanche risks strand 13,000 at Matterhorn base
GENEVA — Unusually heavy snowfall and a high risk of Alpine avalanches stranded about 13,000 tourists Tuesday in the Swiss resort of Zermatt at the base of the famed Matterhorn mountain.
With nearby roads, trains, cable cars, ski slopes and hiking trails into the town closed, Swiss authorities deployed helicopters to ferry some tourists to a nearby village to escape the snow-bound Alpine valley.
A police official in Zermatt, a tourist magnet for backpackers and millionaires alike, said the helicopter journey to the village of Taesch takes about three minutes.
The official said the so-called air bridge can transport about 100 people an hour, conditions permitting.
Only tourists who requested the air bridge were being ferried out, the official said, insisting that it was not an official evacuation.
Swiss state-backed broadcaster SRF showed images of several people wheeling their luggage out to three helicopters, with their blades whirring atop an icy plateau.
Bulldozers were plowing through the snowdrifts in Zermatt so that streets could be salted. One local hotelier said authorities were setting off controlled explosions to help clear away the piled-up snow that had coated roads and rails.
Janine Imesch of the Zermatt tourism office said power had been restored after a temporary outage. She said no people were at risk because authorities had shut down access to the nearby ski slopes and hiking trails a day earlier.
“There is nothing to panic about, everything is fine,” she said Tuesday by phone.