Italian rescue teams are still looking for 13 missing people after the deadly glacier avalanche in the Dolomites. There are ten Italians and three Czechs. A missing person from Lower Austria was contacted by the Austrian consulate on Monday and is doing well. The provisional record of the accident is seven fatalities and eight injured.
So far, three Italians from the northern Italian province of Vicenza have been identified among the victims, including a 52-year-old mountain guide. He is said to have led one of the two rope teams that were buried by the glacier. Hopes of finding the missing alive are extremely low, rescue units said.
Drones with thermographic cameras in use
Eight people were injured in the accident. Among them are a 67-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman from Germany who were taken to a clinic in Belluno province, the hospital said. Authorities continued to search for the owners of four cars with foreign plates on Monday. These parked in the car park, which is normally used by mountaineers who walk towards the summit of Marmolada.
Drones equipped with thermographic cameras, which can detect a person’s heat source even in the dark, rescue teams scoured the Marmolada Glacier in search of the missing. At night, the area affected by the glacier collapse was illuminated with large spotlights. The search will continue in the same way over the next few days as the threat of more glacier fractures makes ground operations impossible.
“The search must continue. In the next few days we will continue to work with drones. We monitor the slope day and night. We can no longer dig, the snow mass has solidified so much that you can no longer cut it with a pickaxe”, declared the president of the National Alpine Rescue Corps, Maurizio Dell’Antonio.