Non-stop rainfall has caused a mountainside in Austria to slide. In the neighboring community, there has been a permanent alert for over two weeks and the situation threatens to escalate.
Hörbranz – The Pfänder (1062 meters) above the two Lake Constance cities of Lindau (Bavaria) and Bregenz (Vorarlberg, Austria) is a popular hiking and panoramic mountain from which you can overlook Lake Constance, the Allgäu, the Bregenzerwald and the Swiss high mountains.
The landslide seen © from above Hörbranz Fire Brigade Facebook
Landslide in Austria: houses shifted by up to seven meters
After the heavy rainfall in Austria in recent weeks, however, the Pfänder has now started to move itself: On April 28, the entire mountainside in the hamlet of Hochreute in the municipality of Hörbranz began to slide - and has been on the move ever since. Debris, earth and broken tree trunks are moving in slow motion and have already made three properties uninhabitable. So far, they have slid up to seven meters down the mountain to the west, where the border with Bavaria is located two kilometers as the crow flies. And it keeps raining.
"Tonight, a landslide with a volume of several hundred thousand cubic meters occurred in the municipality of Hörbranz due to the heavy rainfall. A total of 39 residents had to be evacuated!", reports on April 29 on Facebook Provincial Councillor Christian Gantner (ÖVP), something like the Minister of Agriculture and Civil Protection in Vorarlberg. Above the hamlet, a picture of devastation: trees, earth and boulders lie on top of each other, deep cracks open up in paths and roads.
Dramatic scenes during clean-up work after landslide in Austria
The endangered houses are evacuated. "Everything that wasn't nailed down was taken away," reports Markus Schupp, commander of the Hörbranz fire brigade, on ORF. During the security work, there were dramatic scenes: On Thursday, the fire brigade pumped out oil tanks.
"During the pumping work, ceiling parts came loose and we had to stop the work until we had discussed the situation with a structural engineer and safety measures were carried out," Schupp continues. "Meanwhile, we were able to observe how the terrain and the walls were deformed." In the meantime, a large crack has formed between residential buildings on the farm, and several walls have already collapsed.
Drought prepared the drama – landslide after heavy rain in Austria
The entrepreneur Andreas Jochum was also called in to lay new drainage pipes with his excavator to slow down the sliding slope. According to Jochum, the previous drought caused the slip. "That was once foreseeable somewhere," Jochum told the Vorarlberger Nachrichten. The soil at the Pfänder has a tendency to quickly become hard and cracked during drought. These cracks quickly filled with water during heavy rain, the pressure of which then set the slope in motion.
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According to ORF, the rain reported for Tuesday and Wednesday made the experts particularly worried, according to the state geologist Walter Bauer, they are currently "by far in the worst phase".
In Switzerland, too, there were dramatic scenes when a community had to be evacuated due to the risk of a rockfall.
