The worst disaster in Swiss history, in which 88 people perished after two million cubic metres of ice and debris plunged onto a dam construction site, was dismissed as an “unforeseeable event”. Sixty years after the Mattmark tragedy, the survivors’ memories persist. So do the shadows of a trial in which all of the accused were acquitted, amid political and economic pressure. It’s impossible to say if it was providence, fate or luck that saved Ilario Bagnariol on August 30, 1965. “I don’t know how I managed to survive,” says the 83-year-old. “No one can tell me, not even Father Costante, who is with us each year at the ceremony in memory of the victims.” The former bulldozer driver at the Mattmark dam construction site remembers that Monday 60 years ago as if it were yesterday. “It was a day like any other, and I was preparing material for the construction of the dam,” he says in Ins, a village in canton Bern, where he has lived since 1971. “I’d just shifted a huge boulder when I ...
