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A FASCINATION WITH AVALANCHES
For people living in alpine regions, avalanches are an almost permanent danger in winter. But a small group of people live with and from them.
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valanches are feared. They are a danger to skiers and hunters and for people and infrastructure in alpine settlements. Plenty of money is spent on preventing avalanches or reducing their impact, predicting an event, and training people to deal with the danger. A small group of people therefore lives with avalanches and, partly, from them. The Researcher.
Jan-Thomas Fischer is Head of the Snow and Avalanche Department at the Federal Forest Research Centre, Institute for Natural Hazard Research. “It’s the fun of being outdoors and working with something you can touch.” T h e r e s e a r c h a c t i v i t i e s in his department do
not lie with the individual winter athlete, but rather in “disaster dimensions”. Fischer: “Our research work is mainly in the technical field. We are concerned with how protective structures deal with avalanches.” The benefits of this research are tangible: planners know whether they need to adjust danger zones, and engineering firms can use this information to determine which protective structures should be erected where, how strong they should be and what kind of event they would probably withstand. The Monitor.
Rudi Mair has been the voice of the Tyrolean avalanche warning service for over 30 years. He first studied meteorology, went to the Antarctic and then to the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven. However, he was soon received a call from his home country which told him that there was a vacancy in the Tyrolean Avalanche Warning Service.
R u d i M a i r started working for the country’s av-
alanche warning service in 1990. Today what Mair created at the Tyrolean Avalanche Warning Service is often copied and is standard in many countries. “We were the first to create an avalanche situation report across national borders with the Albina project.” The Instructor.
Harald Riedl has been responsible for training avalanche commissions in the province of Tyrol for 16 years. This is no small task, for there are 1,350 commission members in Tyrol in around 250 commissions. The Tyrol has had an exemplary law which precisely regulates the activities of the commissions since 1991. They must be deployed by the local authority wherever avalanches threaten settlements, roads or sports facilities. Their members assess the respective situation and arrange for protection measures to be taken. In other words, they are used almost everywhere in the country in winter.
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