GENEVA (AP) 鈥 Not quite a flying cow, but almost: Swiss authorities added livestock to the list of evacuees along with about 300 people moved out of a village threatened by a possible landslide from an Alpine mountainside overhead. One puzzled bovine got a lift down by helicopter.
Mayor Matthias Bellwald of Blatten used a news conference Wednesday to praise the community 鈥渟olidarity鈥 in the quick evacuations in his village in the southern L枚tschental valley.
Jonas Jeitziner, spokesman for the L枚tschental crisis center, said by phone that a total of 190 sheep, 26 cows and about 20 rabbits were evacuated, including 鈥淟oni鈥 鈥 an injured cow that needed to be ferried out by helicopter on Tuesday.
It wasn鈥檛 immediately clear when residents would return to their houses or the cows come home.
Alban Brigger, an engineer for the region specializing in natural disasters, told the news conference that fog and cloudy conditions made a precise assessment difficult, but an unstable mass of rock and a glacier remained key concerns 鈥 in particular, the prospect that falling rock could dislodge masses of ice.
A day earlier, he told reporters the area had seen the 鈥渂est-case scenario鈥 so far: several small mudslides had occurred, but a massive 1.5 million cubic meter (52 million cubic feet) block didn't come down all at once.
In 2023, residents of the village of Brienz in eastern Switzerland were evacuated before a slid down a mountainside, stopping just short of the settlement. Brienz was evacuated again because of the threat of a further rockslide.
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Associated Press journalist Philipp Jenne in Vienna contributed to this report.
