OVERWHELMED BY AN AVERLANCHE.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 26, Issue 63, 3 August 1915, Page 7

OVERWHELMED BY AN AVERLANCHE.

One of the most piteous instances of the risks that the peasants of Switzerland run from avalanches is told of the hamlet of B'urgoletto, in the Upper Strum Valley at the foot of the Piedmontese Alps.

It had been a terrible season for avalanches. They began when two ehlMren were tobogganing on a piow field. Suddenly the snow began to move. It seemed the whole world was moving. The terrified children were carried down im the crest of snow waves, that racked and curled. In the valley balow a wedding procession ran a joyous course, with tinkling sleigh belli and cries of joy. Bride and groom with sixteen relatives were utterly overwhelmed by the avalanche, and their bodies found only when v the warm sun melted the mass in the spring.

Next day, in sinister silence, 4£e village of Tauetsch was buried at dawn by a mountain of powdery snow, wind blown arid porous\ ' Out of one hundred and thirty persons who were wondering why the morning did not* break, fifty-five got out unhurt. But in Burgoletto five long weeks elapsed before even the roofs of the houses could be reached by three hundred rescuers. Think of' those sad men walking high up on the frozen mass, and boring for the housetops with great iron rods seventy feet long ! There seemed no hope until the warm winds began two months later. And yet when, after five weeks’ work, a perpendicular tunnel reached the house of a shepherd named Raccia, and rescuers lowered themselves,- as down a chimney, Raccia’s wife and sister-in-law, with his little boy and girl, were found alive.

The stout oak props of an outhouse had kept the great snow masses from crushing them to death, while they had lived upon a goat, some fowls, and the freshly made week’s bread.