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Show Fig. 1. Avalanche paths in the Grosse Valsertal on 11 January 1954. 0 destroyed houses, X destroyed stables, A cable railway stations, . . cable railways, direction of the slides, boundary of the avalanches. 2. Determinations from Destroyed Objects A. Blons and Sonntag The houses which were destroyed in Blons and Sonntag were of a similar type of construction: they had been built of wood on a masonry foundation, either of sawed log or of frame and siding construction. The log houses were in many cases covered with wooden shingles. The destruction will be indicated by some typical examples described below. a) Mesmerhaus in Blons ( Figure 4; Table 1) The house, of log construction, was raised off its foundation by an avalanche, pushed along in its entirety about 50 meters, and stopped inclined on a lateral slope. As a secondary result, due to the sloping position, the upper story with the roof slid off horizontally from the remainder of the structure. The rear wall of the building was pushed in up to a height of 2.5 meters, while the higher gable wall, although very much weakened by window openings, disintegrated, without the logs being broken. No additional exact clues concerning the original construction of the pushed in part of the wall exist. The width of the wall was about 6 meters and the thickness of the logs was 17 to 18 centimeters. It is to be expected that this part of the wall was also weakened by window and door openings. Assuming a wall without openings and a buckling strength of about 400 kg/ cm^ for the existing timbers, a calculated static pressure of a maximum of about 4500 kg/ m^ is required to break the wooden timbers. |
