The deadly bar fire that shook a Swiss town
Danielo Janjic has lost skin on his cheeks, forehead, nose and ears. His hands are buried under layers of bandages, his face covered in ointments. Doctors have assured him that, with time and surgery, the burns will heal.
The searing trauma, however, will remain.
“I'm going to be scarred for life,” Janjic, 20, said recently from his hospital bed in Sion, a town in a valley about 15 miles from Crans-Montana, the ski resort in southern Switzerland where 40 people died and 119 were injured in the devastating fire on the day of New Year's Day.
Many members of the tight-knit community remained in shock Sunday as the identities of more victims became known. A teenager from Milan who loved to ski. The daughter of a councilman. A promising Swiss boxer. The granddaughter of a local architect.
Investigators have identified all of the victims, police said Sunday, although they did not publicly release their names. Most were teenagers. The youngest was a 14-year-old Swiss girl.
For many residents of Crans-Montana, things will never be the same again.
“You can't imagine seeing all those young people piled up in the bar, dead,” said Capt. David Vocat, the local fire chief, in an interview Sunday night. “I wouldn't wish it on anyone.”
Outside, hundreds of people gathered in the cold to watch the live broadcast of the mass on a giant screen. Church bells rang on the town's pine-covered slopes before representatives of different faiths spoke words of comfort in French, German and Italian.
“We are going through a period of crushing darkness,” the Rev. Gilles Cavin later said outside the bar, where residents sobbed, prayed and sang before a makeshift altar of candles and flowers. “But we went through it together,” he said.
The identification of the severely burned bodies of the victims was a slow process, which prolonged the agony of the families searching for their loved ones.
The death of Caroline Rey, 24, was announced on Saturday by her father, Joël, who recalled the harrowing days after the fire, when he called her number and found that “silence filled the air on the other side of the house.” line.”
“This helplessness, this feeling of not being able to do anything but wait for that phone call that will change our lives forever,” Rey, a councilor from the nearby city of Sierre, wrote on social media. “And today, that unnatural call, the one that no parent in the world should ever receive, came.”
Andrea Costanzo, a former executive at a pharmaceutical company in Milan, told Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper, that he had received a similar call about his daughter, Chiara, 16 years old. She had ended up at the bar with some friends only because there was no room elsewhere, she said.
Chiara had three brothers and “was an excellent gymnast, skied impeccably, loved nature and spoke English like a native,” Costanzo said.
“Now I just feel a great emptiness.”
Pierre Pralong, a local architect, confirmed on Sunday that one of his six granddaughters, Émilie Pralong, of 22 years old, he had died. In an interview earlier this week, Pralong said that Émilie, who was studying to be a teacher, was “full of life, smiling and overflowing with joy.”
Benjamin Johnson, a member of the Lausanne boxing club, born in 2008, died while trying to rescue a friend, according to Amir Orfia, president of the Swiss boxing federation. Johnson's friend survived.
“This supreme act of altruism perfectly reflects who he was: someone who always helped others,” Orfia said in a statement, calling Benjamin “a promising athlete and a ray of sunshine.” level.
The two managers of Le Constellation have been placed under criminal investigation over suspicions of negligence, as authorities try to determine possible flaws in the design and management of the premises contributed to the disaster.
Swiss police said in a statement on Sunday that investigators believed the fire had been caused by small fireworks in the basement of the bar. Witnesses and videos suggest the fireworks were placed on bottles, sending out sparks that set fire to foam insulation covering parts of the ceiling.
“Initial witness accounts describe a fire that spread quickly, generating a lot of smoke and intense heat,” police said.
Janjic, the Sion hospital patient, said the fire tore through the basement of the bar as he fled and that he raised his hands to protect his face. Now he can barely move his fingers. He also burned part of his back and buttocks, he said.
In the chaos of that night, it took several hours for the hospital to administer painkillers to Janjic, who was born in Bosnia and raised in Switzerland.
“I couldn't pronounce a single letter, because it hurt so much,” he said. He has already had surgery on his hands, and will soon be transferred to a hospital in Sierre to undergo plastic surgery.
“I feel weak,” Janjic said, with tubes and catheters sticking out of his arms as he settled into bed. “Sometimes I'm on the verge of tears, then I get angry, then I'm sad — I don't know.”
Captain Vocat, the fire chief, is also shaken.
His team of about 70 firefighters is receiving psychological care. Almost all of them are volunteers who tend to rush out of their homes when they are needed, he said.
But on the night of the fire, many were already at the station to keep an eye on the New Year's celebrations. Everything was going on normally. Then, around 1:30 a.m., the call came.
Firefighters arrived within minutes, he said. The sudden burst of flames had already ceased, but people were streaming out of the smoke-filled bar. Screams pierced the air and bodies lay strewn on the ground.
Captain Vocat insisted that the heroism of his team and some of the young men helped save lives. But after 11 years as a fire chief, what he saw that night has made him question whether he wants to continue.
“No one should see this,” he said of the fire. “No one is prepared for this.”
At the firehouse, overlooking the snow-capped Alps, Captain Vocat pointed to some large cowbells in his office that had belonged to his grandfather.
“It's all I dream about now,” he said, of Switzerland's famous alpine pastures. “Settle there and live in peace.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome andDaphné Anglès from Paris.
Ségolène Le Stradic is a journalist and researcher who covers France.
Aurelien Breedenis a reporter for the Times in Paris, from where he covers news from France.