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Dry Snow Moves Fast
Wet-snow avalanches are relatively slow, but dry snow may whistle down a steep slope at extraordinary speed. On March 6, 1898, an avalanche whirled down the Vorder-Glamisch in eastern Switzerland at an estimated 280 miles an hour. It swept across a valley floor nearly two miles wide and climbed up the opposite slope.
Dry-snow avalanches drive a column of compressed air ahead of them and create a vacuum in their wake. The blast of air splinters trees considerable distances from the slide path. A few years ago, the air pressure accompanying an Austrian snowslide blew eight freight cars off their rails.
The trailing vacuum often blows windows from near-by houses. When the Alpine village of Blons, Austria, was destroyed by an avalanche eight years ago, the suction actually pulled several people from their homes.
An avalanche of very light snow insidiously lives up to its nickname, “white death.” The fine powder sifts into the nostrils and throat; it can fatally choke people a halfmile from the slide.
The worst avalanche disaster ever recorded occurred on December 13, 1916, in World War I on the Austrian-Italian front. A series of slides killed 10,000 soldiers of both armies. Avalanches took at least 60,000 lives in the Alps during that war.
It is nearly impossible to escape the path of a fast-moving slide,, but some persons have survived snow burial. In 1951, an avalanche in the Austrian Alps entombed a man for 10 days. He painfully scratched his way to the surface, then waited two days for rescue.
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