Dozens of individuals were airlifted to safety by helicopters in Austria on Tuesday following a mudslide that engulfed homes and mountain huts in the Gschnitztal valley in Tyrol, situated in the southwest of the Alpine nation.
The Austrian Armed Forces utilized a Black Hawk helicopter to evacuate approximately 100 people from Gschnitz village and three remote mountain huts. Harsh thunderstorms triggered the mudslide on Monday, leading to homes being submerged in water and debris, with access roads becoming impassable.
The Bremerhütte, Innsbruckerhütte, and Tribulaunhütte mountain huts were cut off from hiking trails as a result of the landslides, as stated by Elmar Rizzoli, the head of Tyrol’s Center for Crisis and Disaster Management, in an interview with Austria’s public broadcaster ORF.
Local fire department commander Lukas Braunhofer told ORF that after one of several mudslides hit the village of Gschnitz around 6 p.m. on Monday, the Gschnitzbach creek also burst its banks, leading to flooding in the area.
Braunhofer said the mudslides did not appear to have injured anybody, but caused a great deal of damage. Among other things, an open-air museum with a focus on watermills was devastated.
While awaiting their evacuation, residents were asked to stay indoors, not to enter underground garages and basements and also to stay away from the dams on creeks.
“We are monitoring the situation closely and are in constant contact with the emergency organizations,” Rizzoli said.
In May, about 300 people had to be evacuated from the Alpine village of Blatten in neighboring Switzerland just days before a huge mass of rock and ice from a glacier thundered down a mountainside, sending plumes of dust skyward and coating nearly all of Blatten with mud.
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