After Blatten Landslide What is the Future of the Swiss Village?
27th June 2025
Last modified on September 13th, 2025
On May 28th 9m cubic tons of rock, mud & ice came crashing down on the evacuated Swiss village and buried it. There are now plans to re-build & create a ‘New Blatten’.
There have been several rock falls in the Alps in recent years as the temperatures rise, but the burial of Blatten was different at the end of last month.
Four weeks on the consequences are still sinking in and plans are being laid for the future.
The rockfall had been expected, but no-one predicted the size of the landslide and the scale of the disaster.
In terms of the volume and the extent of the damage caused, the collapse of the Birch Glacier was unprecedented.
“I was speechless,” said Matthias Huss, a leading glacier specialist at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology to the BBC.
“It was the worst case that could happen.”
We reported on the disaster at the time on PlanetSKI:
The village of 300 people had been evacuated, but one person chose to stay behind and was pronounced as ‘missing’ after the landslide.
The body of a 64-year-old man was recovered this week.
“As part of a coordinated search operation in the Tennmatten area of Blatten, human remains were found and recovered,” said the Valais Cantonal Police in a statement.
Formal identification of the remains is now underway.
Around 200 civil defence workers, who have been monitoring the river and lake and overseeing the exclusion zone, undertook the initial clean-up work and further assessment have been made over the past month.
Images of the valley from space have been taken by the OLI-2 instrument on Landsat 9 satellite.
The images reveal a landscape dramatically altered by nature’s force.
Satellite images show the vast swath of brown and grey debris cutting through the landscape, a sharp reminder of the power and unpredictability of glacial regions in a warming world.
Image c/o NASA
So, what about re-building of Blatten and its reconstruction?
There is a body of view for Blatten to be rebuilt in the Lötschental Valley and there is political support for the idea.
“Blatten still has a future,” declared the village’s mayor, Matthias Bellwald, immediately after the disaster.
“We’ll go back there.”
He still has the same view.
“I’m not a utopian,” he said at a public meeting this month.
“I have a vision that is feasible.
“It’s a lot of work, that’s for sure.”
The authorities surprised attendees at the meeting by presenting a roadmap to rebuild the village over the next three to five years.
Swiss insurers have put the cost of the damage at CHF 320m (£292m).
Building on the debris cone, which is up to 35m thick in places, is highly unlikely as it is extremely unstable.
The idea of removing the huge piles of debris is unrealistic and dangerous.
Two nearby hamlets spared by the landslide, Eisten and Weissenried, could be developed into a ‘New Blatten’ together with the existing centre of Blatten.
Initial work will begin on developing the two hamlets this year.
An emergency access road is already under construction, with water, sewage and electricity supplies to be provisionally installed.
In 2026, further work is planned, including emptying the dammed lake and re-directing the Lonza river.
Under the ambitious plan, the first temporary buildings would be erected in 2027.
The construction of a new village centre, with multi-purpose buildings, a church, village shop and hotels would begin in 2028.
The municipality also plans to develop new housing.
The first people should be able to settle in the village centre of Blatten again from 2030 according to Mayor Bellwald.
According to NeueZurcher Zeitung, the architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron has already created visual plans.
Many questions remain about authorisation procedures, the political process, financing, safety – and whether the people who were evacuated will actually want to return.
The Valais cantonal hazard map shows that nearly all the Lötschental valley is classed as a red zone – meaning it is considered to be at high risk of landslides, floods and avalanches.
Outside these red zones, the terrain is very steep and there is limited available building areas.
Environment Minister, Albert Rösti, says he is in favour of rebuilding Blatten in principle.
“We want to give the people of the Lötschental a future,” he said.
“But the decision to rebuild must be made by the people of Blatten.
“We want to create the framework to make such a decision possible.
“The road is rocky, in the truest sense of the word.
“Complex questions arise, but the decisive factors will be safety and the needs of the population.”
There will need to protective structures built, but this kind of infrastructure is expensive.
A natural hazard expert at the University of Bern, Andreas Zischg, said it would be possible to rebuild in one of the many red zones in the Lötchental using new infrastructure and barriers to block landslides.
“We can either build avalanche protection structures or erect large protective walls to reduce the danger to a medium or residual level. We can then rebuild in this zone,” he told Swiss public radio, RTS.
The mountain village of Bondo in canton Graubünden in southeastern Switzerland, was hit by a landslide in 2017.
New protective walls, bridges and retention basins have been built at a cost CHF52 million (£47m), almost half of which was covered by the federal government.
The future of Blatten, and how the authorities react, will be of consequence for many mountain communities in Switzerland, the Alps and beyond.
Related Articles:
- Intense summer rainfall in the Alps predicted
- Another Swiss village evacuated due to landslide threat
- Monitoring rockfalls in the Alps
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