Great powder and off-piste skiing and snowboarding go together, and no one is going to ban them, but accidents in recent days in Switzerland have raised the issue of responsibility, moral and legal.

Recent avalanches raise the issue of responsibility

The past five days have seen eight people die from avalanches in Switzerland and more than a dozen others caught by them, with several people hospitalized. Two groups were ski- touring, and in two other cases off-piste skiers and snowboarders appear to have set off avalanches that ended on groomed slopes.

Swiss law

The quick answer is that skiing off-piste is not illegal, but you always carry the risk of setting off avalanches for which you might be held responsible. The tricky part is: who decides if you were responsible, how is it decided and what are the implications if it’s your fault. Police initially seek those who might be responsible for setting off an avalanche, and if they suspect someone is at fault, they file a report with a cantonal magistrate (judge) who is assigned to investigate the case. A judge always investigates in cases of injuries or deaths caused by avalanches, but there have been some cases of damages caused, or even no damages but behaviour judged irresponsible, where a skier or snowboarder was considered to be acting against the public interest.

The Swiss penal code calls for a fine or up to three years in prison if the person acted out of negligence or put a life in danger. In the case of putting several lives in danger the prison sentence can be up to 10 years.

In recent memory people have been fined CHF1,000, according to swissinfo. But they can also be held liable for related expenses, including injuries to other people and cleaning up if an avalanche hits a groomed piste, for example. If a search party, with avalanche dogs and helicopters plus scores of people, is called out to look for people after an avalanche, the cost can soar into the thousands. In the case of the seven people who died Sunday in canton Bern in two avalanches just minutes apart, eight helicopters were called in the first day, then helicopters, private rescue teams and the army were used Monday and Tuesday. A judge is investigating the accident and there is not, for now, any indication that humans caused the two avalanches.

But at what point is someone held responsible? Several factors are typically taken into account, such as whether or not warning signs were ignored, or skiers slipped under fences delimiting zones. A sense of responsibility is taken into consideration. Three off-piste skiers who appear to have set off an avalanche that hit a groomed slope in Anzères did the right thing by stopping to help look for people. They then left, say police and it took police a week to find them. It probably won’t be a point in their favour that they left the scene without giving their names to police, nor did they respond to a police press release asking them to turn themselves in.

Read further

Le Temps newspaper (Fre) and Swiss public broadcast system’s web site, swissinfo, both carry lengthy articles about this today. Le Temps in fact has several related articles, worth taking the time to read. They both interview legal experts and come to the same conclusion, that the Swiss most likely don’t want police on the slopes, monitoring, as they do in Italy.

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