A fire ripped through a bar’s New Year celebration in a Swiss Alpine resort less than two hours after midnight Thursday, 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, and overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of potentially one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies, reports The Associated Press.
“Several tens of people” were presumed killed at the bar, Valais Canton police commander Frédéric Gisler said during a news conference.
Work is underway 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 foreign ministry, citing Swiss police, said it believes around 40 people have died. However, Swiss authorities said they believe “several dozen” people were killed in the fire and added that they could not be more specific.
Beatrice Pilloud, Valais Canton attorney general, 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.
According to BBC, although the cause of the fire hasn’t been confirmed, officials have ruled out an attack. Some witnesses think “birthday candles”, on top of a champagne bottle, set fire to the ceiling.
An evening of celebration turns tragic
Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris who survived the blaze, described “total chaos” inside the bar. One of his friends died and “two or three were missing,” he told The Associated Press.
He said he hadn’t seen the fire start, but did see waitresses arrive with champagne bottles with sparklers, he said.
Clavier said he felt like he was suffocating and initially hid behind a table, then ran upstairs and tried to use a table to break a plexiglass window. It fell out of its casing, allowing him to escape.
He lost his jacket, shoes, phone and bank card while fleeing, but “I am still alive and it’s just stuff.”
“I’m still in shock,” he added.
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle. The flames spread, collapsing the wooden 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 described people smashing windows to escape the blaze, some gravely injured, and panicked parents rushing to the scene in cars to see whether their children were trapped inside. The young man 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 English-speaking 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 Reynard, head of the regional government of the Valais Canton.
The injured were so numerous that the intensive care unit and operating theater at the regional hospital quickly hit full capacity, Reynard said.
