‘The Forest Had Gone’: The Storm That Moved a Mountain
August 11, 2025 at 06:30PMEvery year, high in the Swiss Alps, soccer teams gather for a tournament on a picturesque pitch: Campo Draione sits on a ledge over a mountain stream and is surrounded by forest. In 2024, the celebratory event turned into a disaster scene when a catastrophic series of thunderstorms dropped nearly 8 billion gallons of water in just a few hours. Jonah Goodman has the harrowing story, which The Guardian translated from the original German version, published in Das Magazin:
“I love thunderstorms,” Foresti said. “I get excited about them. I took pictures.” As a meteorologist, he knew that this was not just one storm, but a series generated by a stationary front above him, drawing warm, moist air into it “like a thunderstorm machine.”
Suddenly, he felt uneasy. The front should have moved. It should be over. “It has to stop now,” Foresti remembers thinking. But the rain kept pouring down. He began to think about the valley, about the people running his parents’ tavern down by the river. He and the hundreds of people around him were in terrible danger. As the band played behind him, Foresti began to shake with fear.
When storms come in a series, there are usually lulls between them. But that night, they ran back to back, relentless in their intensity, focused on a strip of land roughly 20 kilometers by nine, stretched along the serpentine ridge of peaks, 2,500 meters high, separating the two valleys of the upper Maggia. Outside this area, the rainfall dropped off sharply; in Locarno, almost no rain fell. But by midnight, more than 50 millimeters of rain per hour—50 liters per square meter—was falling on the ridge. And it landed on snow.
Ticino’s climate is hot, almost Mediterranean, and typically any snow would have melted by the end of May. But in 2024, it had snowed so heavily at the end of April that some still lay on the peaks, one month into a hot summer. Snowmelt saturated the ridge, and the rain ran across wet ground. By the time it reached the treeline, it was still 1,000 meters above the villages in the valleys, but the deluge, thick with grit, already had the force to move rocks and snap trees.
“A phenomenon as turbulent as a debris flow, combining water with sediment, debris and trees, is impossible to simulate,” says Andrea Salvetti, the canton hydrologist. The water moves, but so does everything it touches: a large rock can change its course; a pile of debris can build a dam. “You can’t know where the water will go.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/11/the-forest-had-gone-the-storm-that-moved-a-mountain/
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