celebration turned to disaster<\/a>: Bersier, 20, noticed the ceiling was on fire. He did not see what caused it, he said, but within minutes the flames had spread across the room.<\/p>\nHe grabbed his jacket, he said, and rushed for the only exit he knew \u2013 the stairs ascending to the ground floor. So did many others, leading to a scrum of bodies on the stairs, all of them trapped below ground.<\/p>\n
Suddenly, he felt a heat wave pulse through him, even though, he said, he did not see any flames near him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw my hands decomposing,\u201d he said. \u201cI felt like I was on fire. But there was no fire around me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reaching a veranda at the top of the stairs, Bersier found himself in a melee of flailing and panicking people.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou see panic in everyone\u2019s eyes. There are screams, we\u2019re burning, we see our skin decomposing,\u201d he said. Finally making it outside, \u201cThat\u2019s when I saw my hands, the skin hanging off on all sides,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy face was half-burned, I could tell that my hair was burned. I stank of burns.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Tributes](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/VRMYR23JOQ2YKHKSPC5CDWPO4M.jpg\")
Tributes and candles left in memorial to victims near Le Constellation, in the ski resort town of Crans-Montana, Switzerland, on January 2nd, 2026. Photograph: Til B\u00fcrgy\/ The New York Times <\/p>\n
Friends drove him to the nearest major hospital, a half-hour away in the city of Sion, he said. Doctors have since told him that he suffered burns on his head, hands, lower back and a leg, though they did not disclose the degree of the burns, he said.<\/p>\n
Bersier spoke by phone from the hospital, where officials have barred journalists from entry, and where he is still receiving treatment. He was unlucky to be at the bar in the first place: He had tickets for another club nearby but left because it had yet to fill up.<\/p>\n
As the scale of the disaster becomes clearer, Bersier said, he feels lucky to have survived.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m really grateful to still be here today,\u201d he said, \u201ccompared with others who couldn\u2019t make it.\u201d<\/p>\n
This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Noa Bersier arrived with several friends at Le Constellation shortly after midnight Thursday, he found the bar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225357,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,301,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-225356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-switzerland","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225356\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}