Why overcrowded ski resorts were a disaster waiting to happen

A photo appears to show the moment sparklers set fire to material on the ceiling of the Swiss bar Le Constellation during New Year’s Eve celebrations

It was around 1:30am, an hour and a half into the new year, when a fire started in Le Constellation, a packed bar in the Swiss ski town of Crans-Montana. Within seconds, the entire place was up in flames, killing at least 40 people and injuring more than 100 others.

Swiss officials have confirmed the blaze was likely started by sparklers or fireworks placed in champagne bottles and held aloft in the crowd of revellers, setting the ceiling alight. But what, at first glance, appeared to be a freak accident may yet come to be seen as a disaster that was waiting to happen.

Ski resorts are flooded with tourists during peak season, with après-ski bars competing to attract customers with DJs, live music and ostentatious pyrotechnic displays, often in small, overcrowded chalet-style venues. Prof Ed Galea, director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) at the University of Greenwich, says a tragedy like this was “inevitable”.

“It was no surprise that something like this was going to happen,” he says. “We have seen this sort of event happen all too frequently around the world. Since 2000 there have been 38 of these types of events in bars and nightclubs.

“When you have this lethal mixture of large crowds, limited means of evacuation, pyrotechnics and highly combustible materials, you’re going to have a tragedy. It’s a matter of time. Every festive season I brace myself for something like this to happen.

“We couldn’t have predicted this particular incident in Switzerland, but the fact this was going to happen somewhere in the world, with this mix of influencing factors, was inevitable.”

Galea adds that the risk level is exacerbated by a high proportion of tourists, who will be unfamiliar with a venue’s exits, and intoxication.

“The fact that it’s a tourist location means that most of the patrons are probably going to be tourists, or at least people who are not familiar with the venue. If you have to evacuate, we know through research that people will tend to go out the way they came in.”

‘Overcrowding a problem across the Alps’

Crans-Montana – a high-end resort popular with wealthy Europeans in the heart of the Swiss Alps – is typical of other ski resorts in the Alps and further afield. It has a core population of 10,000, but around 3m yearly visitors, and is often heaving during the most popular periods of winter.

But while demand for skiing has risen – Switzerland had its strongest ski season in 15 years last year – the rising snow line (the result of a changing climate) means the window for accessing the slopes is narrowing.

This shorter season has forced some of the smaller resorts at lower altitudes to close already, funnelling ever more towards those that remain. Following severe overcrowding, one resort in the Italian Dolomites has even taken the decision to cap the number of lift passes it sells online this winter.

Alpine ski resorts become extremely crowded during school holidays, including Christmas - Mike Bird

These trends are, in turn, exacerbating pressure on businesses in the resorts, which already had to find ways to make the bulk of their money from just a handful of weeks a year, including over Christmas, New Year and the February half-term.

This has given rise to fears that some venues may be turning a blind eye to overcrowding at such times, in effect jettisoning health and safety rules, including fire regulations, designed to avert disasters.

“Overcrowding is a growing problem across the Alps,” says Abigail Butcher, a ski and travel journalist. “Swiss resorts are absolutely not alone in that, especially when it comes to après-ski bars and nightclubs.”

“It’s fairly standard wherever you go – indoors, outdoors or underground – for dance floors to be absolutely heaving,” she adds. Sparklers in champagne bottles – the kind thought to be responsible for the fire in Le Constellation – are common practice too. “It’s standard across the Alps, [almost] everywhere you go,” says Butcher.

According to eye witnesses, many of the fire’s victims found themselves trapped in the bar’s basement when trying to flee, with several smashing windows in a desperate attempt to escape. Reports have suggested that there were not enough emergency exits.

Concerns over building materials, evacuation procedures

Eros Mannino, Italy’s national firefighting chief, says the combination of an influx of visitors and a temptation to overlook safeguards in order to maximise earning potential is a real danger at ski resorts across Europe.

The fact that, in isolated locations, there are often “few residents and few resources” to truly monitor what is happening adds to the peril, he says.

Whether a lax approach to fire safety contributed to the blaze in Le Constellation – which, according to its website, can host up to 300 people – is yet to be officially determined. But some have suggested building materials, such as the foam insulation panels thought to have been used in the basement of Le Constellation, could be partly responsible for the speed with which the fire spread.

A Swiss fire consultant, Markus Knorr, told local news outlet 20 Minutes that such panels “burn fast and burst into flames” unless properly fireproofed. In a press conference, Stéphane Ganzer, the security director for the canton of Valais, in which Crans-Montana is located, said: “I don’t know when the municipality carried out [fire] inspections. We haven’t received any reports of deficiencies. However, we assume that the inspections were conducted.”

The bar’s co-owner, Jacques Moretti, told Swiss media the venue had been inspected three times in the last 10 years and “everything was done according to the rules.”

However, the combination of a large group of people, some pyrotechnics, and a small number of narrow exits has several times proved disastrous. On New Year’s Eve in Bangkok in 2008, 66 people died in a fire in a nightclub when a firework hit the ceiling. And last March, 59 people died in a nightclub fire in Macedonia that started in a similar way.

Like Le Constellation, Club Pulse in Macedonia, where 59 people died in March 2025, also allowed pyrotechnics inside and had a small number of narrow exits - Ognen Teofilovski

It is not uncommon for basement bars in ski resorts to have one narrow staircase as the entrance and potentially no other fire exits, according to one British ski instructor based in nearby Verbier, who did not want to be named.

“We’ve all been talking about it on the lift down the mountain, and if the bar was in the UK there would have been multiple fire exits and a sprinkler system, but from the photos I’ve seen, it looks like that wasn’t the case,” he says. “There’s certainly one here in Verbier that was very busy on New Year’s Eve where there’s only one small exit.

“A lot of properties were built into the hillside. I think that’s why everyone here is shaken, too – it’s that sense that the same thing could have happened here.”

Indeed, the scenes in Le Constellation in the hours before the blaze would have been repeated in countless resorts across the Alps on New Year’s Eve. Fire safety consultant Tony Bolder says that, although it’s a “natural instinct to pack people in to make money,” that’s why, in the UK, there are very strict regulations on maximum venue capacity. “As in the UK, there will be national guidance on [fire safety] in Switzerland,” he says. “Certainly from an evacuation point of view, something’s not right here, although we don’t have all the information.”

‘There aren’t many rules here’

Some local business owners in Crans-Montana have suggested fire safety regulations are not properly enforced, saying they expect practices to come under the spotlight in the coming days and weeks.

Despite a nationwide ban on smoking in Switzerland, for instance, some ski bars and hotels still have a designated smoking lounge. “There [aren’t] many rules around here,” one bar manager says. “We have fire extinguishers, but there’s never been a fire test as long as I can remember. It’s not like it’s taken seriously. Whatever has happened [now] is maybe going to change all of that. Something has gone seriously wrong.”

Candles near the sealed-off Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland - Baz Ratner

Others suggest there are wider problems which now need to be addressed too – ones which are at play on slopes across Europe. “The idea of bars and restaurants up on the mountains selling alcohol is not a new one, but there is now a culture of having, late in the day, disco-type events in the mountains where there’s a commercially driven culture of encouraging people to dance on the tables and then ski home afterwards,” says Fred Foxon, a senior ski instructor and expert witness for mountain accidents.

While it is only anecdotal, Foxon says school holidays (including Christmas) and the weeks where mass university ski trips descend on Alpine resorts – usually around Easter – can be particularly dangerous. “High levels of testosterone, high levels of alcohol and crowded slopes – the net result is carnage,” he says.

In Switzerland, the impact of this horrific accident will be felt long after the ski season draws to a close. The country’s president, Guy Parmelin, has described the fire in Crans-Montana as “one of the worst tragedies our country has ever experienced.” One can now only hope lessons are learnt, so it is the last of its kind.

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