CRANS-MONTANA, Switzerland (AP) — A fire broke out during a New Year's party at a bar at a Swiss Alpine resort less than two hours after midnight Thursday; Authorities report that around 40 people died and another 115 were injured, most seriously.

Authorities did not immediately have an exact count of the dead.

The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue, and overnight its packed bar Le Constellation was transformed from a party scene into the site of potentially one of Switzerland's worst tragedies.

Frédéric Gisler, commander of the Valais canton police, explained during a press conference that authorities are working to identify the victims and inform their families, adding that the community is “devastated.”

Beatrice Pilloud, the canton's attorney general, said it was too early to determine the cause of the fire. The experts have not yet been able to enter the premises.

“At no time was the possibility that it was an attack raised,” declared Pilloud.

Later, he said the number of people who were in the bar is “totally unknown at the moment,” and added that its maximum capacity will be part of the investigation.

“At the moment, we don't have any suspects,” he said when asked if anyone had been arrested for the fire. “An investigation has been opened, not against anyone, but to clarify the circumstances of this dramatic fire.”

For his part, Gisler asserted that the priority until further notice will be to identify the victims, and warned that “this work will take several days.”

A night of partying turned into tragedy

Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old Parisian who survived the fire, described the “total chaos” inside the bar. One of his friends died and “two or three were missing,” he told The Associated Press.

The teenager indicated that he did not see when the fire started, but he did see the waitresses arrive with bottles of champagne and sparklers.

Clavier said that he felt like he was suffocating and that at first he hid behind a table, then he ran up the stairs and tried to use a table to break a plexiglass window. It broke away from its frame, allowing him to escape.

He lost his jacket, shoes, phone and bank card when he fled, but “I'm still alive and it's just things.”

“I'm still in shock,” he added.

Two women told the French network BFMTV that they were inside when they saw a waiter carrying a companion on his shoulders. The waitress held a lit candle in a bottle that set fire to the wooden ceiling. The flames spread quickly and caused the roof to collapse, they added.

One of the women described a stampede of people trying to escape the nightclub, located in a basement, up a narrow staircase and out through a narrow door.

Another witness who spoke to BFMTV said people were breaking windows to escape the flames, some with serious injuries, and panicked parents who rushed to the scene in cars to see if their children were trapped. inside. The young man said he saw about twenty people struggling to get out of the smoke and flames and compared what he saw from the other side of the street to a horror movie.

Authorities called the fire an “embrasement généralisé,” a term that describes how a fire can cause the release of combustible gases that can then ignite violently and cause widespread flashover.

“Tonight should have been a moment of celebration and unity, but it turned into a nightmare,” said Mathias Reynard, head of the regional government of the canton of Valais.

The number of injuries was so high that the emergency unit Intensive care and the operating room at the region's hospital quickly reached capacity, Reynard added.

Crans-Montana is less than 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Swiss town of Sierre, where 28 people, many of them children, died when a bus from Belgium crashed inside a tunnel in 2012.

A resort in the heart of the Swiss Alps

In a region very popular with tourists who practice skiing on its slopes, the authorities have asked the local population to, in the coming days, act with caution to avoid any accident that could require medical resources that are already overwhelmed.

With high-altitude ski slopes, at about 3,000 meters (about 9,850 feet) in the heart of the peaks snow-covered and pine forests of the Valais region, Crans-Montana is one of the main centers of the World Cup circuit. The resort will host top men's and women's downhill competitors, including Lindsey Vonn, for their final events before the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in February. The Crans-sur-Sierre Golf Club hosts the European Masters every August on a picturesque course.

The fire in Switzerland on Thursday came 25 years after an inferno in the Dutch fishing town of Volendam on New Year's Eve, which killed 14 people and injured more than 200 as they celebrated in a cafe.

Swiss President Guy Parmelin, speaking on his first day in office, declared that many emergency personnel were “confronted with scenes of violence and anguish indescribable.”

“This Thursday should be a time of prayer, unity and dignity,” he said. “Switzerland is a strong country not because it is protected from dramas, but because it knows how to face them with courage and a spirit of mutual help.”

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Dazio reported from Berlin and Leicester from Paris. Geir Moulson in Berlin and Graham Dunbar in Geneva contributed to this report.

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This story corrects the name of Mathias Reynard, head of the regional government of the canton of Valais.

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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.