Two workers die in a blast at Switzerland's century-old Ritom power plant

Two workers were killed on Wednesday morning after a fire and an explosion inside the old Ritom hydroelectric plant at Piotta, in the Leventina valley of Ticino. Police said the alarm reached the cantonal centre shortly after 9:30 a.m. as a fire inside the building. An explosion then caught the two men. Both later died of their injuries.

One was a 55-year-old Swiss resident of the Lugano area. The other was an 18-year-old Swiss resident of Leventina. Early statements had described two people seriously hurt. By afternoon the police and the Ticino prosecutor's office confirmed both were dead. Prosecutor Valentina Tuoni is leading the inquiry. Causes are not established.

The old hall dates to 1917, some accounts say 1921, and was built to feed current to the Gotthard railway. It belongs to the Swiss Federal Railways. The plant is in the middle of a rebuild. A new turbine hall is due to take over next year. State broadcaster RSI said the old structure was being renovated as part of that reconfiguration. From outside, damage was not obvious. Inside, part of the building was affected.

Rescue units came from several directions. Cantonal police, firefighters from Biasca, high Leventina and Bellinzona, Tre Valli Soccorso and the Rega air ambulance all attended. Local paper La Regione floated one technical hypothesis: a problem with a frequency converter that links the SBB grid to the Azienda Elettrica Ticinese network. That is a reporter's lead, not a finding. The inquiry will have to separate a converter fault from a construction-site fire from something else in a 100-year-old machine room.

Hydroelectric stations of this age are a Swiss fact. They sit in valleys, they feed railways and cantons, and they are being rebuilt rather than replaced wholesale. A construction site inside a live or half-live plant stacks electrical risk on civil-works risk. An 18-year-old on that site is an apprentice or junior hire by any ordinary reading of the ages. The 55-year-old is the age of a foreman or a long-serving technician. The plant took both.

Ritom is not a household name outside Ticino. The Gotthard line is. Current from this valley has been part of that railway's power story for a century. A closed old hall in the last months of its working life is a small industrial death with a large piece of infrastructure behind it. Trains did not stop across Switzerland because two men died in Piotta. The converter hypothesis, if it holds, would tie the blast to the exact joint between railway power and cantonal power.

Workplace deaths in Swiss plants are uncommon enough to lead the cantonal news and to pull in the public prosecutor the same day. They are not rare enough, in old mountain halls under rebuild, to treat as a mystery without a checklist: fire load, dust, gas, live busbars, cutting work, converters. Tuoni's file will run through that list.

The new hall is months from opening. The old hall is now a crime-scene and accident-scene at once. Two ages, 55 and 18, are the only personal facts the police have released. The rest is a building that has made railway current since the First World War and that failed, for reasons still unstated, on a Wednesday morning in September.