Norwegian hotel owner houses and feeds rescue workers after landslide

Transcript

Anita Aasland is spending New Year's Eve working away at her small Norwegian hotel — but she's not hosting any tourists or holiday revellers this year.

Instead, the Raumergården hotel in the village of Ask is serving as the home base for first responders flown in to rescue those still trapped beneath a landslide just a few hundred metres away. 

"I will stay here, keep my hotel open, serve everybody breakfast at six o'clock in the morning — just stay here inside the hotel, helping as much as I can," Aasland told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann. 

"And I must say that I'm very proud of all the other citizens in my small community. Everybody came here with food and clothes and everything that people need. It's a lot of good people with big hearts around who are willing to help, and I will stay here."

On Wednesday, a landslide swept away more than a dozen homes and buildings in Ask in the Gjerdrum municipality, northeast of the capital, Oslo.

Ten people were injured, one critically, and 10 more remain missing — including a childhood friend of Aasland's daughter, along with his wife and child.

Rescue conditions are challenging, however. The soil around the site is unstable, and rescuers are using drones and dogs to search for survivors. Snow, in the meantime, continues to pile up. 

"The ground is like yogurt. It's mud all over. Slippery mud, very dangerous," Aasland said. 

But still, she holds out hope. A dog was rescued from the landslide on Wednesday night. 

"It's still a rescue," she said. "They're still searching for life."

Aasland was out of town visiting her daughter and grandchildren in the country's west coast when the landslide hit. But her other daughter was at home, she says, asleep in the basement of her home near the landslide. Police woke her up when they were evacuating the area. 

"She took the cat and her shoes and ran out," Aasland said. "The house was still standing, and I think the house will be fine when everything is more calm. But she was pretty scared."

Aasland, meanwhile, started getting a flood of phone calls from people with nowhere to go.

"Their houses were gone and they stood in their pyjamas and nothing else. And it's pretty cold out here, lots of snow. And yeah. So they called me and I was not here," she said.

"I was pretty scared, but I drove alone the whole way down here, six and a half hours."

About 1,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. Most of them, Aasland says, had left town by the time she got her hotel up and running.

But now she's welcoming rescuers from out of town. Some are staying there free of charge, she said, while others are being put up by the government.  

She says the rescue site "looks like a war zone," with houses, still intact, sucked into a massive crater in the ground. 

"It looks like a doll house sliding down," she said. 

Her hotel is just a couple hundred metres away from the site, but she says it's built on solid ground and people should be safe there.

Norwegian media, meanwhile, have been asking why construction was even allowed in the area. Broadcaster TV2 reported that a 2005 geological survey for municipal authorities labelled the area at high risk of landslides, but new homes were built three years after the report was published.

Still, the landslide came as a shock to locals, says Aasland.

"This small community has always been [a place where] some parts are dangerous and some parts are very safe," she said.

"We know about the various parts [that] are dangerous, but ... we didn't imagine that this would happen."

Written by Sheena Goodyear with files from Reuters. Interview with Anita Aasland produced by Sarah Jackson.