FRANCE:HOPE WAS fading fast last night for eight mountaineers missing near Mont Blanc after a powerful avalanche caused one of the worst accidents to hit the French Alps in decades.
More than 15 hours after a large chunk of ice broke off from the mountain and prompted the pre-dawn avalanche, five Austrian and three Swiss climbers had still not been recovered from the slopes of Mont Blanc du Tacul.
Regis Lavergne, a rescue worker, said there was "no more hope" of finding them alive. "We strongly suspect that the missing are on the lower reaches of the glacier, underneath the lumps of serac [pillar of ice], which means we can't really do anything," he told French television.
Eight other climbers - five French and three Italian - were injured when the avalanche swept down the mountain at 3am yesterday, hitting a path often frequented by groups heading for the summit of Mont Blanc, western Europe's highest peak. They were recovering in hospital.
A vast search operation begun in the night involving the emergency services, helicopters, Alpine guides and sniffer dogs had to be suspended yesterday afternoon for fear of more avalanches. Rescue workers said there was little or no hope of recovering the bodies of those missing.
"I don't think we'll manage to recover the bodies because they finished up in an area of high risk in which there are highly unstable towers of ice that could easily collapse," Adriano Favre, the director of Alpine rescue, told the AGI news agency.
The wall of snow, which was 200m long and 50m wide when it hit the mountaineers at an altitude of 3,600m, was described by an Haute Savoie police chief as "extraordinary".
Daniel Pueyo said the sheer volume of this slide had made it deadly.
Experts said weather conditions had been "excellent" throughout the night. "Last night it was cold, it was nice, so it was simply the weight of the ice which became too much," explained Yan Giezendanner, from the meteorological station in Chamonix. "It was a big slab and that slab was big enough to reach the team of climbers."
Yesterday's disaster was the latest in what has proved a deadly season in the Alps. According to figures released last week, almost 100 people died this summer in the French, Italian and Swiss peaks, most of them in the Mont Blanc range.
Speaking from Chamonix, where she visited the injured in hospital and met rescue workers, the French interior minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, described the avalanche as "one of the worst accidents we have had for decades . . . Even when all precautions have been taken, as seems to have been the case here, things can go dramatically wrong."
Alliot-Marie said there was no chance of finding anyone alive after flying over the scene of the disaster in a helicopter. The avalanche had been "monumental" and "inescapable".
One of the Italian survivors told French television channel LCI that the climbers had been carried along for 200 metres on a wall of ice. "I wasn't completely submerged . . . I was able to help the others," he said.
The route the climbers were following is often busy, especially in summer. Groups tend to leave from their base before dawn when the snow is at its firmest.
A spokeswoman for a company popular with British tourists in the region, Mountain Adventure Specialists, said it would continue with tours which take in the Mont Blanc du Tacul. "You know, it's the mountain. It's like an accident on the road. This isn't the first and it won't be the last," she said. - (Guardian service)