Brienz, Switzerland, August 2018 - Before and after the 2005 disaster, and Al Gore's views

Some years ago I was privileged to attend one of Al Gore’s ‘presentations’ of his film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.  It was a great occasion.  He started with a number of sharp jokes about his failure to become US President in the year of the ‘hanging chad’ election, but then went on to outline his powerful case about climate change with the aid of a multimedia extravaganza with pictures, graphics, video, sound and everything that modern technology could offer at the time. (The film was made in 2006 before virtual and augmented reality came into use).  Part way through the film I was amazed to see footage of a devastating flood in a Swiss village that I know well – Brienz – which had clearly not been reported in the UK press.

I am in Brienz now, on holiday, and today is the 13^th anniversary of that event on 22 August 2005.  On that day a massive rainfall event in the Bernese Oberland created huge surges of water laden with rocks and tree trunks on the two mountain streams that disgorge into Lake Brienz via the village – the Trachtbach and the Glyssibach.  Houses were destroyed, two people were drowned, and the main streets of the village were rendered impassable because of mud.  The volume of water flowing down the streams emptying into Lake Brienz  resulted in the lake level rising; and with high winds whipping up waves, the lake-front promenade was destroyed.  At the other end of the lake Interlaken Ost station – one the major rail interchanges of Switzerland – was flooded up to platform level.

I was briefly in Brienz in the late summer of 2006, by which time the reconstruction of the promenade along the lake was well under way, but I was unaware of why there had been a need for such work.  I was here again in 2015.  But it has been on my current visit that I have been most impressed by the Swiss engineering response to the 2005 events.  The main road bridge over the Trachtbach used to lie low over the stream, and it was the restricted flow under this bridge that caused it to act as a dam with water, rocks and tree trunks flowing over it and into the houses and roads on either side.  The replacement bridge is an ingenious affair sitting on concrete pillars that project 20 metres lake-wards: if a torrent threatens then the whole bridge can be shifted sideways towards the lake, opening up a larger void underneath.  At the same time a 2 metre high concrete barrier has been built on both sides of the Trachtbach gulley to channel the flow. Other major works have been carried out at the bridge crossing the Glyssibach, including similar 2-metre walls, but here a large holding reservoir has also been created upstream to manage the flow.  Properties damaged or destroyed in the 2005 flood have been reconstructed: the Steinbock hotel next to the Trachtbach bridge displays both its original construction date of 1787 and a prominent message celebrating its reconstruction in 2006 ‘after the storm of 22 August 2005’ (my translation).

Concrete 'slider' for the Trachtbach bridge

The Steinbock hotel, rebuilt after the 2005 flood

I first visited Brienz in 1986 and I have come back many times since, staying in at least three of the village’s hotels and also renting chalets.  It is not one of Switzerland’s most renowned holiday destinations but I like it more than any other.  With a population of around 3000, it is not entirely dependent on tourism: it is also the centre of the Swiss wood-carving industry, with a major training school and a number of craftsmen producing the most intricate, and expensive, carvings imaginable of everything from Christmas cribs to traditional chalets, local animals to avant garde abstracts.  In 2016 I told a Maori craftsman in Rotorua in New Zealand that I knew the main village in Switzerland for woodcarving and without hearing more he held up his tools and said ‘We get these from Brienz’.  The village is twinned with the main woodcarving centre in Bulgaria.  Several shops along Brienz’s village street are dedicated to local wooden products. 

But the biggest of these was severely damaged in the 2005 flood, losing all its stock.  I talked yesterday to the woman who now runs the coffee bar that serves the small museum and showroom that has replaced it, with a bank now taking up the largest part of the original building.  She said that after the flood the carvers who had worked in the premises set up workshops in their own homes.  And during the period when the village was recovering the coaches that used to call for tourists to buy carvings and souvenirs stopped coming.  (I suspect that the opening of a new fast road on the other side of the lake may also have contributed to the change in coach routings).  To my respondent, the village now felt a very different place. And I noticed that a couple of erstwhile souvenir shops on the other side of the road are now closed.  It could be argued that the severe storm of 2005 continues to have a negative effect on Brienz.

So why do I still like the village so much?  Well, it has almost the same accessibility to great local scenic attractions as Interlaken at the other end of the lake, but is still a village rather than a major urban place. It is the meeting point for lake steamers, the railway from Interlaken to Luzern, buses to various outlying villages and the Swiss Open-Air Museum (consisting of historic farmhouses moved here from all over the country), and the old steam-powered rack railway up the Brienzer Rothorn.  There is a free ‘animal park’, created in the late nineteenth century to provide live models for the woodcarvers to work from.  And there are footpaths in the fields above the village as well as a reconstructed lakeshore promenade bedecked with wood-carvings and children’s amusements.   The tourist clientele has changed somewhat since I first came. Fifteen or so years ago the Hotel Bären in the centre of the village was rebranded as an ‘Ayuvedra’ centre offering Indian therapies and treatments, and it now also has a ‘Ganesha’ shop selling Indian goods.  When I first came to this area in the 1980s I was surprised to see how prevalent Japanese visitors were in some parts of the Bernese Oberland, particularly in Grindelwald where many menus had been translated into their language.  More recently (in May 2015) I blogged about Indian visitors in the area, and they have certainly been encouraged by developments such as those at the Hotel Bären.  So change in Brienz has partly come about through globalising trends in tourist markets and not just through the 2005 disaster.

The village of Brienz from the train to the Brienzer Rothorn

The evidence of climatic change is incontrovertible.  But I’m not sure that Al Gore’s use of the Brienz flood of 2005 as an example is justified as showing something entirely new.  This alpine area is one that has always experienced extreme events and continues to do so.  On 26 December 1999 storm ‘Lothar’ brought down vast numbers of trees in the region - particularly on the slopes above Wilderswil.  In July of the same year a flash flood in the Saxeten Gorge south of Interlaken swept away  and drowned 21 young holidaymakers who had been canyoning there.  But these are not new and unique disasters.  Today, on the wall of the Weisses Kreuz hotel in Brienz, I came across an old plaque commemorating the disaster caused by a previous flooding of the Trachtbach stream – in 1870.