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


Emergency officials believe at least 100 and as many as 150 people were killed by the avalanche, which ripped through the gorge Friday evening, a duty officer at North Ossetia's Emergency Situations Ministry said. In addition to local residents, officials fear hikers and campers may have been in the area, which is popular among residents of the regional capital Vladikavkaz, who often head to the mountains on weekends.

Among the missing was a film crew led by popular Russian actor-director Sergei Bodrov, who was shooting a movie high in the Caucasus Mountains. Boris Dzgoyev, the emergency situations minister of North Ossetia, said 49 people from the film crew or local support staff were still missing, while nine were safe - seven who were not with the others and two who managed to get out of the disaster area.

The disaster occurred when a chunk of glacier 150 meters (495 feet) high broke off from high in the mountains and roared down the mountain at more than 100 kilometers an hour (62 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 heard the avalanche's sudden onslaught as he sat with friends in a cafe at a tourist center in the area.

"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."

Authorities said the bodies pulled from the debris were mangled and hard to identify; forensic experts managed to identify only one of the five, a 77-year-old man whose corpse was pulled out of one of two rivers the avalanche followed.

The avalanche slid 33 kilometers (20 miles) - mostly ice and snow at higher elevations and a mix of icy mud and debris lower down - before it stopped on the Gizel-Karmadon highway about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from Vladikavkaz. Seen from the road, the path of destruction was about 300-400 meters (yards) wide.

"The thickness of the mass of ice, earth and stones was between 10 and 80 meters (33 and 264 feet) when the avalanche passed through. The speed was enormously high," Emergency Situations Ministry official Mikhail Razanov said, according to the Interfax news agency. "If people were in that area, there is little to no hope they can be saved."

Nearly 500 rescuers were involved in the search Sunday, and two helicopters buzzed overhead, but by early afternoon workers had cleared just 700 meters (yards) of the 25 kilometers (15 miles) of highway covered in ice and mud. One of the bodies was found Saturday about 9 kilometers (5.5 miles) from the area where the flow of mud halted; the other four were found 3 kilometers (2 miles) further 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 who could end up in the disaster zone."

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 began building barriers in preparation for its fall. When it did break off in 1969, the barriers helped contain the avalanche and there was far less damage than there would have been otherwise, Kusov said.

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