KALTENBACH – Avalanches in Austria and Switzerland have claimed five lives. Three people died in the touristic west of Austria, in Switzerland two skiers died on Saturday who were buried under the snow.
A 17-year-old skier from New Zealand was killed in an avalanche on Saturday in Kaltenbach, Austria. According to the Austrian news agency APA, he had gone off the slopes.
On Saturday morning, another skier who had been reported missing was found dead under the snow in the neighboring Vorarlberg region. It would be about fifty. On Friday, a 32-year-old Chinese man died in the town of Sölden in Austria.
Switzerland
On Saturday morning, a 56-year-old woman and a 52-year-old man died in an accident in the canton of Graubünden, in southeastern Switzerland, police said. They, too, had gone off-piste skiing. A third member of their skiing party was also swept away by the avalanche, but escaped unscathed.
Austria’s warning level of four on a scale of five has not deterred many winter sports enthusiasts from venturing off the marked trails, authorities said. This led to numerous rescue operations on Saturday.
The school holidays have started in Austria and the ski resorts are now full after a difficult start to the winter sports season with little to no snow. In the Alpine country, an average of about twenty people die every year from avalanches and snowslides.
