Jul 3, 10:02 PM
Horw youth camp halted after fatal accident during setup
A 19-year-old woman died and a 25-year-old man was injured while Jungwacht Blauring Horw was preparing its summer camp. The planned two-week camp has now been cancelled.
A summer camp is usually supposed to begin with tents, tired leaders and a fair amount of improvised optimism. In Horw, near Lucerne, it started with a fatal accident instead. During preparations for a Jungwacht Blauring camp on Thursday lunchtime, a 19-year-old woman was killed and a 25-year-old man was injured and taken to hospital.
The man has since left the hospital, according to Jungwacht Blauring Schweiz. How exactly the accident happened remains unclear, and that uncertainty is now the only honest answer on offer. The Lucerne public prosecutor’s office said it would not provide details at this stage because the investigation is still ongoing.
Simon Kopp, the organisation’s media spokesman, said the moment was not the time to assign blame but to establish how such an accident could happen at all. The priority, he said, was to care for those affected. Co-president Luca Belci took the same line, saying the organisation wanted to be present for the relatives and for the leaders who witnessed the accident on site.
A support team is already in Horw to assist those involved. That may sound like the minimum one would expect, but in moments like this even the obvious has to be stated carefully. Grief does not wait for press releases, and neither do questions about safety.
The consequences were swift. The two-week summer camp, which was due to begin on Saturday, has been cancelled by the Blauring and Jungwacht groups in Horw. Ninety participants and 30 leaders had been expected to spend the two weeks together. The leadership team will remain at the campsite for now, both to process what happened and to dismantle the structures that had already been started.
Belci said the organisation is working closely with the authorities to find out what actually happened. Only later, he said, can the incident be analysed and the right conclusions drawn. Those conclusions, he added, must feed into training and awareness work so that accidents can be prevented as far as possible in future. Safety already plays an important role in training and in camp planning, he said — a reassuring sentence, perhaps, though one that sounds rather different after a death.
Jungwacht and Blauring organise activities and camps for children and young people. They are part of the Catholic Church, but according to their own website they are open to children and young people of all cultures, religions and denominations. For now, that broad mission has been overtaken by something much more basic: shock, loss and the uncomfortable task of figuring out how a camp setup turned into a tragedy.
Written by Christiane Hofreiter christiane.hofreiter@alpineweekly.com
