Around 60 guests were evacuated from an Austrian hotel and holiday apartment house early Tuesday after the buildings were engulfed by an avalanche, rescue services said.

"It was lucky the avalanche didn't occur four hours earlier when all of the guests were in the dining room," said Heribert Eisl, of the mountain rescue team in Ramsau am Dachstein, a village in the central Styria region where the accident happened at 1:00 am (0000 GMT).

The dining room was filled with snow up to one metre (three feet) below the ceiling, he told a news conference.

The avalanche shattered the hotel's windows and overturned vehicles in the car park, but no-one was injured, Eisl said.

"We hadn't expected the avalanche to wreak such damage," he continued.

A number of areas in the Austrian Alps have been on high avalanche alert for the past 10 days as a result of heavy snowfall across the west and centre of the country since early January.

In some regions, more than three metres of snow has fallen.

The army has been called in to help clear roads and roofs and evacuate residents in the wake of the bad weather, which has also affected southern Germany and parts of Switzerland.

Related Links
It's A White Out at TerraDaily.com

Tweet

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The Space Media Network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceMediaNetwork Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceMediaNetwork Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only

Swiss town cut off by heavy snowfall
Geneva (AFP) Jan 14, 2019
More than 2,000 people in the Swiss Alps were isolated Monday after heavy snowfall cut roads and rail links as storms continued to wreak havoc across the region. Swiss authorities have raised avalanche warnings in several regions to their highest levels. And, just a week before the World Economic Forum's main annual meeting in Davos, train service to the glitzy ski town in eastern Switzerland has also ground to a halt, national rail service SBB said. The head of the local government in the ... read more