NATURAL HAZARDS : Camping in Switzerland carries certain risks

NATURAL HAZARDS : Camping in Switzerland carries certain risks

From Swissinfo.ch

I’ve found this post on Swissinfo.ch about Switzerland, but this applies to all mountainous areas all over the world really.

It states that about one in three campsites in Switzerland located in or near a risk zone along rivers, lakes or in avalanche regions, are in danger. This was found in an in-depth analysis by the Sonntags Zeintug and Le Matin Dimanche newspapers.

Photo: SB VonLanthen. Unsplash. NATURAL HAZARDS : Camping in Switzerland carries certain risks.
Photo: SB VonLanthen. Unsplash. NATURAL HAZARDS : Camping in Switzerland carries certain risks.

There are 444 campsites across the country of which some are open all year round. People living in these zones during the winter or bad weather spells with high waters could be killed.

I have been last year trekking with my family in Courmayeur during a week when it was raining a lot every afternoon – one day we’ve been up the mountain and we made it down and to the multi-sports enclosed centre when it started raining, and the next day, we’ve heard that just up the road a bit, in Val Veny, there was a massive mudslide as the rivers got really full with lots of rain in a short period of time, and a couple had been wiped away in their car and perished. One has to respect these areas, as nature can turn very hard against one really quickly.

This report stressed on the importance for campsites to deal with emergency plans. There is different regional legislation in the wide-ranging local autonomy in Switzerland. Clients are not conscious of the risks they can incur when in these campsites.

This past Saturday, the newspapers of the Tamedia publishing house published an online nationwide map, based on information from the country’s 26 cantonal authorities.

The report’s authors claim that there are more than one million people in Switzerland (with a total population of 8.5 million) living in a flood risk zone, 65,000 of them even in a high-risk area.

More information: Swissinfo.ch 

Check out the Via Alpina if you are planning a hiking holiday in Switzerland. But maybe your hiking has to be delayed until at least July as May had record snowfalls in Switzerland. With this late snow all over the Northern Hemisphere- will we be having snow starting in December when we need it? Who knows? I would like to have a glass ball now!

Photo: Mana. Unsplash. NATURAL HAZARDS : Camping in Switzerland carries certain risks.
Photo: Mana. Unsplash. NATURAL HAZARDS : Camping in Switzerland carries certain risks.

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Featured Image: Some hikers in Lake Lucerne. Photo by Jon- Unsplash. NATURAL HAZARDS : Camping in Switzerland carries certain risks.

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