Residents evacuate after mudslide hits Swiss-Italian border village (video)

On Wednesday, August 23rd, a mudslide slid down the side of Piz Cengalo Mountain, near the Swiss – Italian borders, forcing the residents of an Italian village to evacuate and leaving 8 people missing.

The mudslide took place at about 09:30 local time (07:30 GMT) Wednesday morning, involving about 4 million cubic meters of material and causing an impact equivalent to 3.0 on the Richter scale, according to the senior police official Andrea Mittner. The slide area was 5km (3 miles) long and "tens of metres" high in places, police said.

Eight people are reportedly missing; all of them are thought to have been at the Bondasca alpine valley at the time of the slide. Mittner described the missing people as "alpinists and walkers", stating that "these people may have been in the disaster area at the time of the event". Rescue efforts to locate them have not yet been successful.

The village of Bondo, which is located about 130 kilometers north of Milan, has been entirely evacuated, after an alarm system went off on Wednesday, in time to allow for the evacuation of about 100 locals. Bondo will remain sealed off until at least Friday morning, according to Mittner, and it is not clear when its residents will be able to return back home.

Police of Graubuenden canton (state) said that buildings were damaged, a fact visible in the drone footage that follows, capturing the state of Bondo village after the landslide.

According to Markus Walzer, a Graubuenden police spokesman, the alarm system that allowed for the prompt evacuation of Bondo's residents, was put in place after a huge landslide occurred in the region in 2012. He said the weather in the region had been good in the recent days, and the cause of the mudslide wasn't immediately known.