Ten people were injured, one of them critically, and 12 people remained unaccounted for after a landslide in southern Norway swept away more than a dozen buildings in the early hours of Wednesday (December 30), police said.
The landslide struck a residential area in the municipality of Gjerdrum, about 30 km (19 miles) north of the capital Oslo. Police said some 700 people had been evacuated from the area.
Rescue workers continued to search the area for children and adults who were feared to have been caught in mud and debris, police said.
“We’re still looking for survivors,” police spokesman Roger Pettersen told a news conference.
TV footage of the site showed a large crater with destroyed buildings at the bottom of it. Other buildings hung on the edges of the crater. Two more houses collapsed into the crater on Wednesday afternoon, broadcaster NRK reported.
Norway’s King Harald said the landslide had made a deep impression on him.
Masses of earth are still moving in what has been one of the largest clay slides in recent Norwegian history, Toril Hofshagen, the regional head of the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, told a news conference.
(Reuters)
