Six people died, including two guides, after an avalanche that occurred on Sunday on a glacier in the Mont Blanc massif, in the French Alps, according to a new assessment carried out on Monday by the French authorities.
The authorities had indicated that five people had died in the avalanche, which occurred Sunday morning on the Armancette glacier, located in the Mont-Blanc massif, near the town of Contamines-Montjoie, in the Haute-Savoie region of the Alps. French.
“We have just found the sixth victim,” regional prosecutor Karline Bouisset told the AFP news agency on Monday.
According to the regional prosecutor’s office, the body is that of a man and is probably the husband of the 39-year-old woman who was found dead on Sunday night by rescue teams.
The couple lived in the suburbs of Lyon, according to the same source.
On Sunday, the emergency services found a total of five dead, rescued one slightly injured person and eight other people escaped unharmed from the disaster.
The avalanche surprised “three groups of skiers”, each one “supervised by one or two mountain guides”, according to the local prosecutor’s office.
Among the dead are two guides from the St-Gervais (Haute-Savoie) company, born in 1974 and 1984, the National Union of Mountain Guides announced in a statement. There is no further information on the other victims.
The weather conditions were good on Easter Sunday, the mayor of Contamines-Montjoie, François Barbier, told the AFP news agency.
Météo-France, France’s meteorological institute, has not issued avalanche warnings for the region.
On this same glacier, two brothers, experienced mountaineers in their twenties, died on December 25, 2014.
According to the mayor, a larger avalanche occurred in the same place in December 2021, “up to the town”, but without causing casualties.
Source: TSF
