vulnerable are mountain climbers, skiers, snowmobilers, and travelers in
mountainous terrain.

In 1885 an avalanche at Alta, Utah, killed sixteen and buried thirteen
people who were eventually rescued. Near Alta, in the Wasatch Range,
avalanches killed 200 people between 1865 and 1915. In 1910 a devas-
tating avalanche plummeted down a mountain in Washington, sending
three locomotive engines and some cars over the side, burying them
under tons of snow and killing 100 passengers. Heavy snows and high
winds have caused avalanches in mountainous regions throughout the
world, which have resulted in numerous casualties. The worst avalanche
ever at a U.S. ski resort took place near Lake Tahoe, California, on March
31, 1982 when seven people were killed.

An avalanche smashed into a remote Icelandic fishing village in Jan-
uary 1995. Buried in the rubble were sixteen dead, half of them children,
who died in their beds. Three days later perhaps as many as 175 people
were killed after an avalanche slid down a Himalayan Mountain slope
near Jammu, India. During the first weeks of the skiing season of 1997,
at least sixteen skiers lost their lives due to avalanches in Switzerland.
Hundreds of snow slides swept through British Columbia, Montana, and
Utah during early January 1998. Experts constantly monitor huge gla-
ciers in Italy's western Alps, which have been known to have sections
drop onto inhabited valleys.

More than thirty-two bodies were pulled from the snow in January
1998 after an avalanche buried vehicles on a mountain highway near
Tehran, Iran. On January 25, 1998, the weight of thirty-two students and
six adults over the fragile powder of five feet of new snow on an Alpine
ridge near Embrun, France, during a snowshoe trek, caused a deadly
avalanche killing eleven in the party. Warning flags and safety signs
posted in the area that indicated the danger of an avalanche possibility
were ignored. A dozen climbers nearly 12,000 feet up Mount Rainier
were swept away in June 1998 by an avalanche, precipitated by warm
spring weather that caused the snow base to become slushy. Eventually
all but one were rescued via airlifts by army helicopters. The worst single
accident on Mount Rainier occurred on June 21, 1981, when eleven peo-
ple died in an icefar. It is estimated that more than 300 hikers and climb-
ers died in accidents on the mountain over the past 100 years.

An avalanche swept down on a gathering on January 1, 1999, at a
remote Eskimo village called Kangiqsualujjuag, 950 miles northeast of
Montreal, Quebec. Nine residents of the Inuit community were killed
and twenty-five others were seriously injured when tons of snow roared
down a 250-foot hill only eighteen feet from the school gymnasium,
knocking out a wall where more than 400 were celebrating the holiday.

-4-