The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-09-17 00:00:00

TERRIBLE LANDSLIP IN SWITZER-

LAND.

A Reuter's telegram dated Berne, Sept. 12, says
that a landslip occurred on Sunday evening near the
town of Elm, in the Canton of Glarus. A large
quantity of earth fell from a mountain into the valley.
About 200 persons were killed, and thirty houses
destroyed.

The village of Elm is about ten miles from the town
of Glarus, from which the canton takes its name, and
occupies a picturesque situation in the Valley of the
Sernf (or Sernf-Thal), at a point where the river of
that Lame is joined by the Raminbach. Although
Elm is the highest township in the valley, being some
3,2001 t. above the sea level, it is so encireled by
over-hanging mountains that, according to common
and not improbable report, the sun does not
reach it for six months in the year. At no great dis-
tance from it rises the jagged eminence of the
Tschingelhorner or Mannen, which, at a height of
8,648 ft., is perforated by a curious cavity, known as
Martinsloch, and through this hole twice a year the
direct rays of the Bun fall on the church at Elm. The
population of the village is rather over 1,000, so that
nearly one-fifth have perished in this disaster.

The Times, in noticing the disaster, gives the following
account of a previous landslip in 1806 :
The disaster is not by any Means of a kind unex-
ampled in Switzerland. In a much more frequented
part of the territory of the Republic, many travellers
have seen the ruins of Goldau, near the Lake of
Lucerne. The original Goldau was destroyed by the
fall of the Rossberg in 1806. An excellent account of
the disaster is given in "Murray," and no one can
approach the village now known by the name of
Goldau without seeing traces of the catastrophe
which Varied the earlier and much larger village
of the name. The valley is strewn for a con-
siderable distance with the stones and rubbish which
mark the landslip, while the mountain which caused the
calamity is still scored from top to bottom, and
nothing grows upon its barren surface. The Ross-
berg or Ruffberg is a mountain 5,190 ft. high. The
upper part of it consists of a conglomerate formed of
rounded masses of other rocks cemented together and
called by the Germans Nagel/Luc or Nailrock, from
the knobs and protuberances which its surface pre-
sents. From the nature of the structure this kind of
rock is very liable to become cracked, and if rain-
water or springs penetrate the fissures they will not
fail to dissolve or moisten the beds of clay which
separate the Nageljtue from the strata below it, and
cause large portions to detach themselves from the
mass. The strata of the Rossberg are tilted up from
the side of the Lake of Zug and slope down towards
Golden. The slanting direction of the seams which
part the strata is well seen on the road from Art.
Within the period of human record, destructive
landslips had repeatedly fallen from the Romberg,
and a great part of the piles of earth, rock, and stones
which deform the face of the valley, derive their
origin from such catastrophes of ancient date; but
the most destructive of all appears to have been the
last. The summer of 1806 had been very wet, and on
the Ist and 2nd September the rain had been inces-
sant. Towards two o'clock in the afternoon, the face
of the mountain began to move, and a mass estimated
to be a league long, I,oooft. broad, and 100 ft. thick,
slipped down into the valley below, overwhelming
the villages of Goldau, Bussingen, and Rothen and
a part of Lowerz; the rich pasturage in the valley,
and on the slope of the mountain, entirely over-
whelmed by it and ruined, were estimated to be worth
£150,000; three houses and more than 200 stables and
chalets were buried under the debris of rocks, which of
themselves form hills several hundred feet high.
More than 450 human beings perished and whole herds
of cattle were swept away. Five minutes sufficed to
complete the work of destruction. The inhabitants of
the neighbouring towns and villages were first roused
by long and grating sounds like thunder; they looked
towards the spot from which it came, and beheld the
valley shrouded in a cloud of dust; when it had
cleared away they found the face of nature changed.
The houses of Goldau were literally crushed beneath the
weight of superincumbent masses. Lowerz was over-
whelmed by a torrent of mud. Such a mass of earth
and stones rushed at once into the Lake of Lowerz,
although five miles distant, that one end of it was
filled up and a prodigious wave passing completely
over the island of Schwanau, 70ft. above the usual
level of the water, overwhelmed the opposite shore,
and as it returned swept away into the lake many
houses With their inhabitants. The village of
Seewen, situated at the further end, was inundated
and some houses washed away, and the flood carried
live fish into the village of Steinen. The chapel of
Olten, built of wood, was found half a league from the
place it had previously occupied, and many large
blocks of stone completely changed their position.
The inhabitants thus destroyed in the midst of se-
curity are said to have been remarkable for their
purity of manners and the excellence of their physique.
The new church of Goldau contains two tablets of
black marble, inscribed with the names of some of the
sufferers, and with particulars of the sad event, which
is still remembered with horror in those remote val-
leys, and will now be paralleled by a similar disaster,
as appalling in its character, although not equally
destructive to human life.

The Standard notices the Elm disaster in an article, from
which we take the following :
-

-
The particulars received are brief, but it seems that
upwards of two hundred people were killed and thirty
houses destroyed, in addition to which calamities we
must reckon many unrecorded injuries, the loss of
stock, and, as invariably happens in such cases, the
embedding of fields and gardens in the debris
which has been projected down the mountain
side. The past twelve months, indeed, have been
notorious for landslips. Scarcely a line of railway or
deep cutting has escaped temporary obstruction by
the embankment giving way after the recent long-
continued rains. Happily, however, with the excep-
tion of the lamentable one at Naina Tal, in the
Himalayas, which occurred almost exactly twelve
months ago, none have been productive of serious
injury to property or of loss of life. At Naina Tal
nearly forty Europeans and between one hundred
and fifty and two hundred natives were buried
beneath the mass of earth and the ruins of
the buildings which were undermined. The Elm
disaster, unless more complete information should
prove the fatalities to be exaggerated, is of even
greater magnitude, and in extent approaches some of
those which are historic. For instance, in 1248 part
of Mont Granier, south of Chambery, in Savoy, fell,
and buried sixteen villages belonging to five parishes.
In 1618 Monte Conto overwhelmed the prosperous
little town of Plurs, with two thousand four
hundred and thirty inhabitants, under a mass
of earth and rock sixty feet in thickness.
All attempts to penetrate this covering proved futile
and nowadays every trace of the place has dis-
appeared. The name has been preserved in the
village of Plurs, noted for its soap-stone manufactures,
but the site of the vanished town is at present clothed
with a luxuriant forest of chestnuts, which may
embalm for future ages, as the ashes of Vesuvius
have done that of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the
domestic economy of the seventeenth-century Switzers.
At a still later date, by the shifting of one of the
five peaks of the Diablerets, eighteen people, many
cattle, sheep, and goats, and several hundred
cottages were buried. In 1714 and 1749 there were
serious cataclysms of this nature; but almost daily
large masses of the soft calcareous strata, saturated
and undermined by the water from the glaciers to the
north-east, are precipitated into the depths below.
Already three of the five rocky summits have given
way, and the chances are that the other two will,
at an early date, share the same fate. In the
year 1772 a landslip on Mount Piz, in the State
of Venice, buried three villages ; whilst, in
1806, the fall of the Rossberg, behind the Righi,
covered four villages and five hundred people in the
Goldau Valley, besides filling up about one-fourth of
the Lake of Lowertz. The cause of these landslips is
everywhere much the same. They are due to water
soaking in between strata of different density, with
the result that the upper rocks slide over the lower
ones.

Writing on Tuesday night, the Geneva correspondent of
the Daily News says :
Later reports fully confirm the first accounts of the
nature and extent of the calamity which has befallen
the unfortunate village of Elm. The place was
one of some 900 inhabitants and 171 dwellings, in
the Valley of the Shernf, a stream that flows
through the village, dividing it into two unequal
portions, one of which is called Unterthal. A few
days ago the Tschingel Alp, a mountain hard by,
composed of lopse limestone and slaty rock, showed
alarming symptoms of an approaching fall. It
seemed as if a part of it overhanging the village were
about to slip down. Great gaps opened here and there,
ominous noises were heard, and the people, becoming
seriously uneasy, called in the local forest master to
devise means for averting the impending danger which,
nevertheless, no one seems to have considered immi-
nent. Between five and six o'clock on Sunday after-
noon, without any further warning, a great naass of earth
and rock fell sheer on Unterthal, overwhelming the
greater part of it. On this a number of people ran from
the opposite side of the stream to ascertain the extent of
the calamity, and carry help to the survivors; but
hardly had they reached the scene of the disaster
when they themselves and all that remained of
the village were buried under a second land-
slip. Fifty houses are destroyed. Two hundred
persons, nearly all of whom must have perished,
are buried under the ruins, and much meadow
and pasture land belonging to the' commune has
been rendered useless. The beds of two small
streams, the Ravin and the Tschingelbaeh, are
blocked up. The Serf is also dammed, and the
valley is being rapidly converted into a lake. All of
Elm that the landslip has spared is in danger of being
destroyed by the flood. Great consternation prevails
in the valley and every house is deserted. The
Federal Government have sent engineers to the spot,
who are directing the operations for extricating from
the ruins any of the buried who may still be living,