Steve Gorman
Los Angeles – At least 10 skiers are missing and at least six others are stranded and waiting to be rescued amid heavy snow after an avalanche hit a rural slope in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains on Tuesday (US time), authorities said.
Hours after the morning calamity, as night fell and a nearby road was closed due to zero visibility in the middle of a winter storm, a spokesman for the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office, Capt. Russell Greene, said rescue crews had not yet reached the site of the avalanche.
“It’s going to be a slow and tedious process because they also have to be very careful when accessing the area because the avalanche danger is still very high,” Greene said in an interview with the Sacramento-based television station. KCRA-TV.
The avalanche swept through the Castle Peak area in Truckee, California, about 10 miles north of Lake Tahoe, around 11:30 a.m. PST, engulfing a group of 16 skiers, according to a Facebook statement posted by the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office.
The group consisted of four ski guides and 12 clients. At least six survived and remained at the avalanche site awaiting rescue, while the others were missing, according to the statement.
If all 10 missing skiers perished, the incident would rank among the deadliest avalanches ever recorded in the United States. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center (CAIC) has counted six avalanche deaths in the United States so far this season.
Avalanches have claimed an average of 27 lives each winter in the United States over the past decade, the CAIC reported.
A winter storm warning was in effect for much of Northern California, with heavy snowfall predicted in the upper elevations of the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra Avalanche Center had posted a predawn alert Tuesday, warning of a “high avalanche danger” in the ski region, according to the sheriff’s statement.
“I don’t think it was a good choice,” Greene said of a ski tour company’s decision to take paying customers into the backcountry under such conditions, adding, “but we don’t know all the details yet.” He declined to name the company involved.
Ski rescue teams were sent to the avalanche zone from Tahoe Donner’s Boreal Mountain Ski Resort and Alder Creek Adventure Center.
At approximately 5:15 p.m. PST, Greene said rescuers, some of them in Snowcat tracked vehicles, were still trying to reach the avalanche zone.
He said the survivors, who were communicating with rescuers via radio beacons and text messages, had taken shelter in a makeshift shelter, built partly from sheets of tarpaulin, and were “doing everything they could to survive.”
Greene declined to say how many ski guides and how many of their clients were among the missing.
Weather conditions remained hazardous in the Sierra foothills, and additional avalanche activity is expected through Tuesday night and into Wednesday, according to the sheriff’s statement.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom was informed about the avalanche and state authorities were “coordinating a joint search and rescue effort” along with local emergency teams, his office said in a post on X.
Two separate avalanches this week in the French Alps killed three people and injured four, local authorities and French media said.
Around noon, a large landslide, about 300 meters wide, washed away a road and a path in the town of Valloire, in southeastern France, the prefecture of Savoy said in a statement.
Rescue teams, including mountain police officers, firefighters, canine units and army specialists, were deployed for more than four hours before operations were halted in the late afternoon due to the risk of new avalanches, the prefecture added.
Two of the injured were in serious condition and were evacuated by helicopter to nearby hospitals, he added.
French broadcaster BFMTV also reported, citing the Gap city prosecutor, that two skiers had previously died in an off-piste avalanche in La Grave, in the neighboring Hautes-Alpes region.
The deaths come as France deals with heavy snowfall in the Alps and flooding in several western regions after days of heavy rain.
Reuters
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