Russia avalanche death toll climbing

GIZEL, Russia -- As rescuers picked through deep debris choking a gorge in southern Russia after a huge chunk of glacier raged down the mountainside, authorities said Sunday there was little hope of finding anyone alive in the avalanche they feared killed as many as 150 people.

Emergency workers pulled the bodies of five people from the ice, mud and debris that covered part of a village, said Lt. Gen. Ivan Teterin, head of the Emergency Situations Ministry for southern Russia and head of the rescue effort.

Earlier, officials said 17 other villagers whose homes were destroyed were believed dead, though their bodies had not been found. Ninety-four people were reported missing by relatives.

Emergency officials believe at least 100 and as many as 150 people were killed by the avalanche, which ripped through the Karmadon Gorge in North Ossetia Friday evening, a duty officer at the region's emergency situations ministry said.

Among the missing was a film crew led by popular Russian actor-director Sergei Bodrov, who was shooting a movie in the Caucasus Mountains.

'It sounded like a train'

The avalanche was set off when a chunk of glacier 495 feet high broke off and roared down the mountain at more than 60 mph, accumulating a mix of mud, rocks and uprooted trees as it went.

"It sounded like a train was coming, but there are no trains here. We saw an enormous mass coming in our direction, and we ran," said Dmitry Podalyakin, 18, who was sitting with friends in a cafe at a tourist center in the area when the avalanche roared down.

"When we came back we saw that some of the (tourist center's) cabins were covered by the mass. There were cries of 'Save us!', but we could do nothing except stand there," he said. "Soon the cries stopped."

The avalanche slid 20 miles before it stopped on the Gizel-Karmadon highway about six miles from Vladikavkaz. Seen from the road, the path of destruction was about 300-400 yards wide.

"If people were in that area, there is little to no hope they can be saved," Emergency Situations Ministry official Mikhail Razanov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

Nearly 500 rescuers were involved in the search Sunday, and two helicopters buzzed overhead, but by early afternoon workers had cleared just 700 yards of the 15 miles of highway covered in ice and mud. One of the bodies was found Saturday about 5 miles from the area where the flow of mud halted; the other four were found 2 miles farther uphill.

A village near the path of the avalanche, Gornaya Saniba, was ordered evacuated Sunday because of the danger it could be hit by flows of mud, said Vladimir Ivanov, an aide to Dzgoyev.

In Moscow, Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu said experts had flown to the region to determine whether there was a risk the rest of the glacier could fall.

"One of our main tasks now is to determine how the remainder of the glacier will behave," Interfax quoted him as saying. "If the weather suddenly becomes warm then we will have to take measures to evacuate people."

It was the third time in a century part of the glacier had fallen -- an occurrence experts connected to humid, rainy weather over the summer.

In 1902, a piece of the same glacier wiped out the village of Genal, killing several dozen people, said Genri Kusov, a geographer and historian at North Ossetian State University. In the Soviet era, the government began constant monitoring of the glacier and when it began to grow in the 1960s, authorities built barriers in preparation for its fall. When it broke off in 1969, the barriers helped contain the avalanche.

The government stopped monitoring the glacier in the 1970s, he said.