First Person: Avalanche!
CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth is on assignment in Austria. As he reports on the severe winter weather, he has been witness to the tragedy swept over a small Tyrolean town with a series of avalanches. He filed this report exclusively for CBS.com.
It looks like M*A*S*H, in winter. A parking lot the size of two football fields in this tiny Tyrolean town has become the staging area for the helicopter rescue and evacuation effort at Galtuer, about 25 miles away.
For most of the day, olive-drab Austrian Army choppers were seesawing in the air with smaller, bright yellow helicopters of the Red Cross. With deafening noise and a blinding swirl of snow, they'd touch down and take off in synchronisation, just like the choppers in the movie and TV show.
But instead of carrying casualties from a battlefield, they were transporting refugees from the avalanche: European vacationers who'd gone to Galtuer to enjoy the snow, and been trapped there by its deadly force.
Except for a small pool of Austrian journalists transported by the army, reporters have not been able to get to the site of the avalanche. Landeck is easy enough to reach by road from Innsbruck, but roads beyond here are blocked. The only way to get to Galtuer is by air, and authorities aren't ceding space to reporters on the rescue flights.
The noise is so great, and the wash from the huge rotors so strong, that I wondered if the helicopters themselves might risk triggering avalanches as they flew on their mercy missions. Raymond Mayr, a scientist here who's studied Alpine avalanches for almost two decades, assured me they don't. He also pointed out that the risk of new avalanches here is already as high as it can get; it stands at risk level "5" on a scale that goes no higher, and until there's a change in the weather, he expects it will stay there.
Avalanche survivors here who told their stories all spoke of a sudden darkness that fell as the snow swept into their ski resort. But they told conflicting stories about the sound of an avalanche. It was "like gunfire," said one man, or utterly silent in the recall of another. A Belgian woman clutching her young son said she heard a rushing noise "vroom, vroom", and another earwitness said it sounded like a giant snow plow until it pushed up against his hotel with a crunching sound.
What they all agreed on was the absolute surprise; there was no warning and no chance to get out of the way. Survival, they said, seemed to depend on fate or a lucky accident. An early return to the hotel to accommodate a child in need of a bathroom; a woman who said she was inside her rented chalet, because she wanted to watch TV -- ski jumping championships were being broadcast.
None that I met imagined that a winter vacation could be so treacherous, and yet anyone with experience in the Alps will tell you there is no such thing as a risk-free mountain. What dumbfounds visitors and residents alike is he severity of the snow this year. There's been nothing like it in fifty years, people say, or even in a century; certainly no winter like this one in most people's memory. Yet weather is only part of the reason why the death toll's been so high on Europe's mountains this season. The ever-growing popularity of ski vacations is the other.