Avalanche in Italy Flows Downhill, Around Houses

An avalanche, when it gets moving, starts to behave like a fluid, with the giant snowballs, rocks, boulders, and loose snow the flow picks up along its path appearing to move as if a liquid. You can see that effect in several places in this terrific amateur video of an avalanche that recently happened in the mountains of South Tyrol in Italy:

Luckily, nobody was hurt; with warning, the people who lived in the houses seen in the video, and others nearby, were evacuated. The video was shot by a local farmer named Thomas Ennemoser who was on top of his barn shoveling snow at the time the avalanche broke.

It's been a bad month for mountainside danger in Italy. See our previous post: Giant Boulders Plow Through Field, Barn, Narrowly Miss House