Disbelief in Crans-Montana on New Year's Day

There is sheer disbelief on people's faces here, confronted by this tragedy - they just can't believe it.

I've been coming to Crans-Montana all my life, and this is a wonderful ski resort that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

There's a lot of building going on all the time. It's a place where there's a lot of money and a lot of great skiing. It's very family friendly and there are lots of children.

In the summer they've got golf, in the winter they've got skiing, there are mountain bike trails. It's a really popular destination year round, quite a high-end market, and not the kind of place where you would expect a fire to engulf a bar.

Le Constellation is somewhere I used to go to when I was much younger. It's a really classic bar.

It's very big and right smack in the centre of Crans just by the cinema, and somewhere a lot of locals as well as tourists would be hanging out.

This is a bar where lots of young people went. There will be people who are unsure if those they knew were out there, who are trying to trace them.

Earlier today, I was speaking to a woman who asked: "What is happening in the world if you can't go to a bar now in Crans-Montana?"

A British tourist told me he'd heard all these ambulances and just thought people had taken the drinking too far.

But, of course, what it actually involved is this horrible tragedy.

It's hard to imagine that something like that would happen here, in a place where there's money, very good levels of health and safety, great infrastructure and where police arrived at the scene pretty much immediately.

This morning I woke up to go skiing, but when I saw what had happened I came to the scene instead.

The cordoned off area is usually the beating heart of Crans. Initially it was incredibly quiet. I got there before they had erected this huge wall outside the bar. In the early hours of New Year's Day, people were sleeping off their hangovers and their partying, so the police presence gave the scene an almost eerie quality.

Now more and more media tripods are going up. People started waking up - some had their skis on - and they all just came up against the cordon and asked what was going on. Some people had not heard yet.

Increasingly however small huddles of people are talking about it. Some people have been sharing their stories of a really tragic and horrific night - how they saw people with severe burns, and how they escaped the burning bar by smashing a window.

Others are looking in total disbelief at the police cordon in this very well-to-do Swiss Alpine resort. The size of the cordon, the amount of disruption and the number of closed roads all indicate a major disaster.

It's just completely shocking.