Exactly a year after a major fire ripped through the Swiss mountains in Valais, the police have published their findings into what caused the disaster. The report detailed a story which begins with a gunshot and ends with 132 hectares of forest being destroyed.
At 5pm on July 17, 2023, the emergency services in Switzerland reported that a major forest fire was underway in the Bitsch municipality in Canton Valais. The fire brigade ordered local residents to evacuate as the fire spread across the local mountains and hillside.
Hundreds of people were forced to leave their homes in the town of Oberried. While the peak of the fire was put out on July 18, after round-the-clock water bombings from the Swiss Army and Air Zermatt, the fire took weeks to be extinguished completely. In the end, 132 hectares of forest were destroyed by the blaze, the size of 160 football fields, but luckily the authorities were able to save all homes and no people were killed during the incident.
A year on, the Cantonal Police in Valais have published their investigation into what caused one of the worst forest fires seen in Switzerland for years. Officials wrote in a statement that they had “ruled out solar radiation or a lightning strike as the cause of the fire” and that the cause was human and most likely deliberate.
Shortly before the fire was first reported, the local energy plant in the area near Bitsch reported an outage due to a severed conductor cable. “The investigations showed that an unknown perpetrator in the Flesche area had presumably deliberately shot the main line's conductor cables several times with a long gun," the report claimed.
Police found evidence that a bullet had pierced the “copper wire of the branch line at a mast," which had caused a short circuit. "The overheating caused by the short circuit caused the conductor cable to break and fall to the ground."
They confirmed that once the cable had fallen, workers at the power plant, in line with procedure, had switched the cable back on to check the fault. This surge of power is said to have melted the cable on the floor “and ignited the surrounding dry vegetation.” As the canton was in the midst of a major drought, this small fire quickly developed into a major inferno.
The public prosecutor in Valais confirmed that they and the cantonal police are still looking for witnesses to the incident. Anyone who has information linked to the forest fire is encouraged to contact the authorities on 027 326 56 56.