Steve Gorman
Updated ,first published
Los Angeles: Nine skiers remain missing after an avalanche in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, but six others who had been stranded have since been rescued, authorities said.
The avalanche swept the Castle Peak area of Truckee, California, north of Lake Tahoe, on Tuesday (US time), engulfing a group of skiers, according to a Facebook statement posted by the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office.
Those rescued have varying injuries and two were sent to a hospital for treatment.
The sheriff’s office revised the number of people in the group to 15 from an earlier estimate of 16.
If all nine of the missing skiers should perish, the incident would rank among the deadliest single avalanches on record in the United States. The Colorado Avalanche Information Centre has tallied six US avalanche fatalities so far this season.
Avalanches have claimed an average of 27 lives each winter in the United States over the past decade, the centre reported.
A winter storm warning was in effect for much of northern California on Tuesday, with heavy snow forecast in the upper elevations of the Sierra Nevada.
The Sierra Avalanche Centre had posted an alert before dawn on Tuesday, warning of a “high avalanche danger” in the ski region, the sheriff’s statement said.
A spokesperson for the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office, Captain Russell Greene, said rescue teams had to navigate additional avalanche threats.
“It’s going to be a slow, tedious process because they also have to be very careful accessing the area due to the fact that the avalanche danger is still very high,” Greene said in an interview with Sacramento-based television station KCRA-TV.
“I don’t think it was a wise choice,” Greene said of the decision of a ski tour company to take paying customers out into the backcountry under such conditions.
Rescue ski teams were dispatched to the avalanche zone from the Boreal Mountain Ski Resort and Tahoe Donner’s Alder Creek Adventure Centre.
The survivors had taken refuge in a makeshift shelter, constructed partly from tarpaulin sheets and communicated with rescuers via radio beacon and text messaging.
Greene declined to say how many of the ski guides and how many of their customers were among the missing.
Weather conditions remained hazardous in the Sierra backcountry slopes, with additional avalanche activity expected through Tuesday night and into Wednesday, according to the sheriff’s statement.
California Governor Gavin Newsom was briefed on the avalanche, and state authorities were “coordinating an all-hands search-and-rescue effort” in conjunction 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 left four wounded, local authorities and French media said.
Around midday, a large slide, about 300 metres wide, swept across a road and a footpath in the town of Valloire, southeast France, the prefecture of Savoie said in a statement.
Rescue teams, including mountain police officers, firefighters, dog units and army specialists, were deployed for more than four hours before operations were halted in the late afternoon due to the risk of further avalanches, the prefecture added.
Two of the wounded were in serious condition and were evacuated by helicopter to nearby hospitals, it said.
French broadcaster BFMTV also reported, citing the prosecutor in the town of Gap, that two skiers had died earlier in an off-piste avalanche in La Grave in the neighbouring Hautes-Alpes region.
The deaths come as France grapples with heavy snowfall in the Alps and flooding in several western regions after days of intense rain.
Reuters
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