French rescue services plan to take advantage of a favorable weather window on Tuesday, September 9, to resume the search for four Korean and Italian climbers who have been stuck in bad weather for three days near Mont Blanc, they said on Monday.
“The search will continue tomorrow (Tuesday)” indicated the Chamonix High Mountain Gendarmerie Platoon (PGHM), specifying that the weather conditions had not allowed for intervention on Monday.
“We believe there will be a window of calm tomorrow (Tuesday) and plan to resume the search, without any guarantee of success,” Captain Nicolas Zickler, deputy commander of the PGHM, told AFP.
Still hope
According to him, “it is quite possible to survive more than three days if you can protect yourself from the wind and the cold.” No contact has been established with the climbers since Saturday.
On Saturday late afternoon, the PGHM was alerted to “three roped parties lost not far from the summit of Mont Blanc in very poor weather conditions”.
A rope team made up of two Koreans was able to be evacuated on Sunday morning, with the support of significant resources, at an altitude of 4,100 m, not far from the Col de la Brenva.
But the deterioration of the weather conditions did not allow for intervention for two other teams that were being sought, two other Koreans and two Italians.
A PGHM command official told the regional daily Le Dauphiné Libéré that it had been possible to “locate and briefly exchange on the phone with the two Italians who were on the north face of Mont Blanc at an altitude of 4,600 metres”, before the conversation was interrupted.
- BFMTV.com
