The recordings of emergency calls published by BfmTv reconstruct the chaos of New Year’s Eve in Crans-Montana minute by minute
At 1.30am on January 1st, while New Year’s Eve is still underway and Crans-Montana is sleeping under the snow, a call arrives at the Swiss emergency number switchboard that breaks the night. “I would like you to come, because there is an emergency at the Constellation.” It is the beginning of a sequence of calls for help which, in the space of an hour and a half, will reach 171. The place is on fire. When the fire is put out, the toll will be devastating: 40 dead and 116 injured.
Those calls, now in the investigation documents, were partly broadcast by the French television BfmTv and broadcast in Italy by Diary of the day. Recordings that crudely portray the sudden collapse of a night of celebration, transformed into a death trap.
The voices from the Constellation: “There are too many injured, send help immediately”
The words overlap, often broken by panic. «Please, it’s the Constellation in Crans-Montana. Ma’am, there is a fire, there are injured people.” Someone shouts, someone struggles to make themselves understood. “We need to send help immediately, there are too many injured.” The calls continue to arrive until 3 in the morning, while the smoke and flames advance inside the room.
Many callers are in shock. They try to describe what they see, what they hear, what they fear. “I almost died at Constellation. I think I got burned. The Constellation burned entirely.” Then silence, or a sentence that weighs like a sentence: “I think my friends are dead inside.”
The coordination of relief efforts and the first assessments
The coordination of interventions takes shape through the emergency center. Ambulances are sent, firefighters converge on the site of the fire, while the first responders on site also begin to communicate with the switchboard. “I’m on the fire in Crans-Montana,” one of them reports. «First assessment: three seriously burned victims».
It’s just the beginning. As the hours pass, the real dimension of the tragedy will emerge, one of the most serious ever to occur in Switzerland in an entertainment context. The investigations will try to reconstruct responsibilities, structural deficiencies, possible violations of safety regulations.
A massacre that also opens up a judicial and civil front
Parallel to the criminal investigation, a long and complex judicial process regarding compensation is looming. According to initial estimates, the requests from civil parties could range between 600 million and one billion Swiss francs. A process which, without an out-of-court agreement, risks continuing for over a decade.
Numbers that tell not only the economic cost of the tragedy, but above all its human impact: dozens of broken families, hundreds of young people marked in body and life, an Alpine community forced to deal with a wound destined not to heal quickly.
Recordings as evidence and memory
The calls from that night are not just investigative material. They are a sound memory of the disaster, the real-time chronicle of an emergency that grows minute by minute. Voices asking for help, who don’t yet know that many won’t be able to get out, who speak while the symbol of Crans-Montana nightlife turns into hell.
Weeks later, those recordings continue to convey the crudest dimension of the massacre: not the figures, not the reports, but the sound of fear, confusion and impotence of those who, on that New Year’s Eve, understood too late that there was no more time.
