What a snowstorm in Zermatt and 36 hours without electricity taught my kids about crisis, creativity, and staying calm.

Last week, unusually heavy snowfalls in Zermatt blocked roads and trains, caused trees to collapse onto power lines, and cut the village off from civilization for three days. No electricity, no fresh supplies.

I was in Zermatt at that time. Alone with two of my kids.

I knew that those days would be days of bad weather. The kids announced that they would play Monopoly all day long during those non-skiing days, and I thought I could quietly work away on some long-delayed tasks.

How wrong I was. I woke up on Thursday, 17th April 2025, realizing that both the power and 5G network were gone. A glance out of the window made clear what happened: During the night, more than 50cm of fresh snow fell and it was still snowing relentlessly. At the end of the day, more than 1m of fresh snow should have fallen — in mid-April.

I started acting like I normally act in such situations — observe, orient, decide, act. Heck, I’ve learned and practiced making decisions under pressure and in crises in my 20+ years as an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces. I even teach crisis management, for example to IMD MBA students.

This time, there was a new component in the equation: Kids.

The crisis was severe enough for them to learn a few lessons, yet not severe enough that they were traumatized. An ideal situation for real learning. And Dad had plenty of time to teach them, as he couldn’t work anyway as his laptop was running out of battery quicker than electricity returned.

Here is what my kids learned in those three days.

1. Scenario Thinking

For the kids, the most important thing was not when electricity would return, but when we could return home. Easter was coming, and my wife and our third child were at home, and the kids wanted to celebrate Easter together as a family and with their grandparents.

Therefore, we discussed what options there exist to get out of Zermatt:

1. If electricity wouldn’t return before Saturday, there was a high chance that we would miss the Easter celebration. There were thousands of tourists trapped in Zermatt, and all of them needed to get out of Zermatt as quickly as possible to catch their flight as soon as electricity and traffic would return. We didn’t want to queue for hours. We agreed that we would return D+2 after electricity returned — no matter what day “D” was.
2. If electricity returned faster than expected and the ski lifts reopened fast, we agreed to spend the first day with electricity on the slopes, even if there wouldn’t be any queues to travel out of Zermatt. Easter was still a few days away, and the weather forecast was blue skies after the hefty snowfalls.
3. If electricity wouldn’t return fast but the roads would open, we could take the 1-hour walk from Zermatt to Täsch and catch a replacement bus to get to Visp, and then onwards by train.

We ended up with a combination of scenarios 1 and 2 — electricity returned Friday night, we spent Saturday skiing and traveled home on Sunday in a half-empty train.

2. Creativity

Crises require creativity. How do we make coffee without electricity? What can we eat if we can’t cook? Where do we get information if we don’t have internet access?

We ended up making coffee with an inverted fondue oven and a few candles. We ate bread and dry meat, like the mountain farmers a century ago. And we walked to the town hall twice a day to get the latest information on a flipchart.

The crisis wasn’t severe enough that there wasn’t room for fun. The kids said they would tell their classmates that they had to kill a deer with a Swiss army knife and grill it on candles to avoid starving to death.

I reminded the kids how little it takes before they would kill and eat an animal, even without grilling.

3. Support

A crisis is a situation of deficiency: Nobody has everything they need. But many people have some things they need. The key question is to ask yourself who can support you, and who you can support.

Can we charge Dad’s laptop in a hotel connected to the backup electricity grid in exchange for having a drink in the hotel bar? Can we trade a hot cup of coffee from the fondue oven against something else we don’t have?

Are there people in the village who are worse off than we are? Do the trapped tourists need help? Are there any lonely people in the neighborhood we could invite to play cards in the dark?

One for all, all for one.

That’s the motto that’s engraved in the ceiling of the Swiss parliamentary building. Nothing represents Switzerland in a crisis better than this motto.

4. Wait

A crisis unfolds fast, but it can take longer than expected to resolve. In Zermatt, both the weather and the lack of information mandated one thing: Patience. Hard for adults, but even harder for kids.

After one day, the 5G network returned, and mobile phones could be charged at an emergency contact point on a power generator. That meant that we didn’t have to rely on flipchart information from the town hall any longer. At the same time, checking the mobile phone every 5 minutes would just have drained the battery faster without any additional information. The kids realized that checking for updates on the mobile phone would make the crisis go away faster, but would mean two trips a day to the emergency contact point to recharge the phones instead of just one.

5. Preparation

My kids love creating lists for all sorts of things. During the blackout, they started compiling a list of emergency kit we would have to buy after the crisis to be ready for the next blackout. A generator. Lots of candles. Power banks. A gas stove to cook pasta. More food supplies.

They also realized that we would have been just fine at home in our self-sufficient house — because Mum and Dad prepared years ago, even at the price of being laughed at by many people.

6. Priorities

The day before the blackout hit, the kids wanted to watch a Champions League football game on my iPad. Because the match was played late at night, I said no. I promised them they could check the results the next morning on my iPad.

When they woke up the next morning to severe weather and no electricity, priorities shifted from football results to more basic needs.

And within minutes after electricity was restored two days later, the kids said: “Dad, can we check the result of that Champions League football game?”