CRANS MONTANA: Teenagers Eleonore and Elisa started the year with a frantic search for friends who have been missing since a deadly fire tore through a bar in a neighboring town in Switzerland.
“Are they okay? Are they just in the hospital?” says one of the 17-year-olds.
They haven’t heard from them since a blaze tore through a New Year’s celebration in the luxury resort town of Crans Montana, turning what should have been a night of festivities into a worldwide tragedy.
Police estimate that around 40 people have been killed and around 115 injured, many of them young visitors to the Swiss Alps.
Officials have begun the arduous process of identifying the victims, but with some of the bodies badly burned, police warned the process could take days or even weeks.
Relatives and friends have been scrambling to find their loved ones with many images circulating on social media.
“We tried to reach them; some of their locations are still displayed here,” said one of the teenagers from Valais, nodding to the bar, now shielded by opaque white tarps and behind a wall of temporary barriers.
“We took lots of pictures [and] we put them on Instagram, Facebook, all kinds of social networks to try to find them,” said Eleonore.
“But there is nothing. No answer. We called the parents. Nothing. Even the parents don’t know,” she added.
They managed to get the news that a friend was in a coma in a hospital in the city of Lausanne.
More than 30 victims were taken to hospitals with specialized burn units in Zurich and Lausanne, and six were taken to Geneva, according to a Swiss news agency.
There is no official estimate of the missing or the number of employees from Le Constellation bar that night.
Italian Ambassador Gian Lorenzo Cornado told AFP that five of the injured have not yet been identified.
A few hundred meters from the remains of the burnt bar, the nearby convention center has been converted into a crisis unit.
Away from the press and guarded by the police, the victims’ families are received and offered assistance by authorities, diplomats and priests.
Swiss President Guy Parmelin said the support offered would be “long-lasting”.
Nathan, a 19-year-old who was in the bar just before it caught fire, said AFP he keeps expecting to wake up from the “nightmare”.
“It feels like… I want to wake up tomorrow and have all my loved ones back who unfortunately died in this incident,” he said.
“Usually a new year is full of happiness, but unfortunately this has happened.”
