Avalanche Toll Mounts To 38
Rescue workers in the Austrian Alps on Saturday found the body of a young German girl, the 38th victim of a series of avalanches in the region.
There was initial confusion over the identity of the body, found under rock-hard snow and ice in the cellar of a house in the ski resort of Galtuer after an all-night search by 200 rescue workers.
The victim was later named as 10-year-old Carmen Schulz of Heiningen.
APA news agency said both her parents and her sister also had been killed in Tuesday's avalanche. Thirty-one people were killed in Galtuer and seven died in a separate snowslide in nearby Valzur on Wednesday.
The main road into Galtuer was reopened for the first time in over a week on Saturday morning but it was closed again a short time later by a minor avalanche.
One person is thought to be still missing from the slide in the village of Valzur.
Both Galtuer and Valzur were evacuated Thursday, except for rescue crews and locals wishing to stay. But 1,000 tourists refused to leave, either waiting for roads to reopen or determined not to quit their holidays.
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Tourists in Galtuer who had been waiting for evacuation described two nights of terror, fearing another avalanche would hit, reports CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth.
Flown to safer ground, the emotion became relief.
"It was frightening, but I feel we've been saved," one woman said.
With good weather, the airlift became an air shuttle. Giant American Blackhawk helicopters piloted by the U.S. Army started flying just after dawn and didn't stop all day. Sixty GIs with a fleet of nine aircraft helped transform the mountain evacuation into mission accomplished.
"Every time we came in, we would tell them how many people we could hold and they would bring them to us," said Brian Huseman, a U.S. army officer.
Rescue workers now don't expect to find more survivors, but are searching for the dead. The bodies of the victims -- Germans, Austrians, Dutch and Danes - will be flown to Innsbruck for a memorial service, said Wendelin Weingartner, governor of Tyrol province.
One rescue inspired hope. A 4-year-old boy, buried in the snow for almost two hours in Valzur, was sniffed out by a specially trained dog.
"The child was lifeless - clinically dead - when we found him," a rescue worker said.
Doctors saved his life by slowly "warming him up" before sending him to a hospital in the town of Zams, where he was reported in stable condition on Friday.
The cleanup process has begun in the sunshine. While a break in the weather has made it easier to move people off the mountain, it's also created new fears that the warmer temperatures will set off more avalanches.
The Galtuer avalanche was the most severe Europe has seen this winter, itself one of the snowiest in 50 years. Avalanches have claimed more than 70 lives across the continent this year.
In Switzerland, authorities in the resort of Leukerbad said a man-made avalanche that rolled into the village Thursday was set off by the local explosives specialist, without informing emergency officials. The avalanche sent one person to the hospital with a suspected heart attack, and several others were treated for shock.