A fire ripped through a bar’s new year celebration in a Swiss Alpine resort less than two hours after midnight yesterday, with dozens of people feared dead and about 100 more injured, most seriously, police said.
The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue, but overnight its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of potentially one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies.
“Several tens of people” were presumed killed at the bar, Valais Canton Police Commander Frederic Gisler told a news conference.
Photo: EPA
Work is under way to identify the victims and inform their families, but “that will take time and for the time being it is premature to give you a more precise figure,” Gisler said, adding that the community is “devastated.”
The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said information from Swiss police indicated about 40 deaths, but Gisler declined to give a specific figure.
Valais Canton Attorney General Beatrice Pilloud said it was too early to determine the cause of the fire.
Experts have not yet been able to go inside the wreckage.
“At no moment is there a question of any kind of attack,” Pilloud said.
Helicopters and ambulances rushed to the scene to assist victims, including some from different countries, officials said.
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV that they were inside when they saw a barman carrying a barmaid on his shoulders. The barmaid was holding a lit candle in a bottle that set fire to the wooden ceiling. The flames quickly spread and collapsed the ceiling, they told the broadcaster.
One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from a basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door.
Another witness speaking to BFMTV described people smashing windows to escape the blaze, some gravely injured, and panicked parents rushing to the scene to see whether their children were trapped inside.
The witness said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames, and likened what he saw to a horror movie as he watched from across the street.
Officials described how the blaze likely triggered the release of combustible gases that ignited violently and caused what firefighters call a flashover or backdraft.
“This evening should have been a moment of celebration and coming together, but it turned into a nightmare,” said Mathias Renard, head of the regional government.
The injured were so numerous that the intensive care unit and operating theater at the regional hospital quickly hit full capacity, Renard said.
Swiss President Guy Parmelin expressed shock at the scale of the disaster, which came less than a year after a fire in a club in North Macedonia killed 59 people.
“What was meant to be a moment of joy turned, on the first day of the year in Crans-Montana, into mourning that touches the entire country and far beyond,” he wrote on social media, expressing condolences.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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