Swiss police: 8 missing after mudslide near Italian border
GENEVA — Rescue workers used a helicopter and dogs to search for at least eight people still unaccounted for in a Swiss Alpine valley on Thursday, a day after a mudslide and rockslide hit a small village near the Italian border.
The village of Bondo, about 130 kilometres (80 miles) north of Milan, has been evacuated. The slide Wednesday morning sent about 4 million cubic meters (140 million cubic feet) of material crashing down, causing an impact equivalent to 3.0 on the Richter scale, senior police official Andrea Mittner said.
Police in Graubuenden canton (state) said buildings were damaged, and images from the scene showed a trail of destruction left by a river of mud and stone. They initially said that there were no injuries.
But police said Thursday that they haven’t been able to reach eight people who may have been in the Bondasca valley at the time of the slide — nationals of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Six of those people have been reported missing by relatives, none of them children.