Disbelief as tragedy hits Swiss ski resort on New Year’s Day
There is pure disbelief on the faces of the people here faced with this tragedy; They can’t believe it.
I’ve been coming to Crans-Montana all my life and it’s a great ski resort that’s getting bigger every day.
There’s a lot of construction going on all the time. A place with lots of money and great skiing opportunities. It’s very family friendly and there are lots of kids.
They play golf in the summer, ski in the winter, and have mountain bike trails. It’s a really popular year-round destination, it’s a pretty high-end market and it’s not the kind of place where you’d expect a bar to be bursting with fire.
Le Constellation was a place I went when I was much younger. A truly classic bar.
The place is very big and right in the center of Crans, right next to the cinema and there are many locals hanging out there as well as tourists.
This is a bar where many young people go. There will be people trying to track down people they know, unsure if they are there or not.
I was talking to a woman earlier today and she asked me: “What in the world is going on if you can’t go to a bar in Crans-Montana right now?”
A British tourist told me he heard all these ambulances and thought people were drinking too much.
But of course it actually involved this terrible tragedy.
It’s hard to imagine something like this happening in a place where there’s money, health and safety is great, infrastructure is excellent, and police arrive at the scene promptly.
I woke up this morning to go skiing, but when I saw what was happening, I came to the scene.
The cordoned off area is often the beating heart of Crans. It was incredibly quiet in the beginning. I got there before they built this huge wall outside the bar. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, people were sleeping off their hangovers and partying, so the police presence gave the scene an almost eerie quality.
More and more media tripods are now rising. People began to wake up – some had put on their skis – and they all came to the esplanade and asked what was going on. Some hadn’t heard of it yet.
But small groups of people are increasingly talking about it. Some people are sharing their stories of a truly tragic and terrifying night, how they saw people with severe burns and how they escaped the burning bar by breaking a window.
Others stare in utter disbelief at the police cordon at this well-to-do Swiss Alps resort. The size of the cordon, the amount of disruption and the number of roads closed all point to a major disaster.
This is completely shocking.
