Following heavy rainfall on Saturday and during the night, the Rhone River and its tributaries have flooded.
Keystone / Jean-Christophe Bott
Due to flooding in canton Valais, southern Switzerland, the A9 motorway between Sierre and Sion is closed. The entire canton is on alert, cantonal authorities said on Sunday.
Flooding and debris flows occurred along the Rhone River and its tributaries following heavy thunderstorms on Saturday and during the night. Added to this was the melting snow and the fact that the ground was already saturated with water.
Do you want to read our weekly top stories? Subscribe here.
The A9 motorway was closed between Sierre and Sion on Sunday morning. Numerous other roads in the canton were also impassable, including the Simplon axis. Traffic was also severely disrupted on the Simplon railway line. The situation on the roads and railways could change quickly, wrote the cantonal command centre. It recommended checking online before travelling.
More
![A13 Closer](https://www.swissinfo.ch/content/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2024/06/617228060_highres.jpg)
More
How Switzerland is trying to defeat extreme weather events
Hundreds of relief workers were deployed in Valais, namely 20 command units, around 320 firefighters from over 30 corps, 100 members of the civil defence, over 100 employees of the departments responsible for transport infrastructure as well as employees of municipal services and private companies.
Translated from German by DeepL/gw
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here. If you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here. To offer feedback on this news story, please write to english@swissinfo.ch.