Sliding Death

Laden with snow shovels, pickaxes, blankets and stretchers, German and Swiss skiers by the hundreds last week dashed across the Austrian borders at Bregenz and Feldkirch. Customs officials forgot all the usual frontier formalities as they waved them on. The shouted phrase, "We're going to Blons," was all the passport that was needed.

Blons, a quiet village in Austria's picturesque Great Walser Valley, was only one of many corners of Europe caught in the backlash of a deceptively mild winter that had suddenly turned vicious. Cross-Channel shipping was brought to a dead stop for two days as winds, roaring in from the Atlantic, whipped the seas into a fury. Far to the south in Italy, gondolas lay at their moorings in Venice under coverlets of snow. Even in Algeria, the snowplows were busy on the streets of Constantine.

Whirlybird Rescue. Hardest hit of all Europe, however, were the valleys of Switzerland and Austria, where only a month ago hotelkeepers, hoping for good ski weather, had despaired of the unseasonable warmth. There, the choking Staublawinen (dust avalanches), which literally drown their victims in a rush of dry, powdery snow, and the hurtling Rutschlawinen (slide avalanches), which bury their victims under sliding tons of packed snow, ice and boulders, wrought fearful havoc.

In the valleys of Austria's Vorarlberg Province, the toll was the worst in memory: 113 dead. The village of Blons alone was buried under two avalanches, one of them 90 ft. deep. "It looked." said an observer, "as though it had been hit with an Almighty fist." Swiss and U.S. Air Force helicopters flew in to Blons and the other hamlets to help the skiborne rescue workers. To rescue two villagers, Captain Billy Sayers of Lubbock, Texas maneuvered a ten-passenger whirlybird into a 30-ft. square stamped out on a Blons hillside by the boots of a rescue party.

Distant Thunder. The White Death, as the valley folk call it, seemed to claim its victims by the wildest caprice. One woman, buried for ten hours in the ruins of her kitchen, passed the time by telling fairy tales to one of her daughters. Another daughter lay dead and buried in the snow just beneath them. A woman of 70 was swept into the icy River Lutz and rescued from the shore more than two days later. But near by, a peasant, wearily plodding across the fields, saw his house, his wife, his mother and his three children all swept to oblivion in an instant.

As the week ended, many of Austria's villages were still without milk, bread or medical care. And in the mountains, the thunder of sliding death could still be heard, ominous and unpredictable.

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