Nine Germans die in Austrian cable car plunge

By Alexandra Zawadil

VIENNA (Reuters) – Nine Germans, apparently including six
children, were killed when a helicopter dropped a concrete
block on a cable carrying a string of gondolas in an Austrian
ski resort, police said on Monday.

The helicopter was carrying material to a mountaintop
construction site when it dropped the block, knocking one car
off its wires and leaving others swinging so violently that
their passengers were thrown out.

Austrian radio said the victims were traveling to the
glacier ski area above the popular Alpine resort of Soelden in
the western Austrian state of Tyrol.

“I can confirm that they are German,” a spokesman for
police in Tyrol said. The injured were also believed to be
German, he added.

A spokeswoman for the Austrian Red Cross said up to 10
people had been seriously injured in the incident. Christian
Laucher, a spokesman for the rescue services, said there were
six seriously injured.

Television pictures showed bodies lying on the rock beneath
the glacier. More than 100 other passengers had to be rescued
from stranded cars.

“It was with great sadness and grief that I learned of the
tragic cable car accident at the Tiefenbach glacier in Soelden,
Tyrol, in which nine holidaymakers from Germany, including
apparently six children, were killed,” German Foreign Minister
Joschka Fischer said in a statement.

Police said six of the dead appeared to be children but
could not confirm their age.

Soelden, close to the city of Innsbruck, is a popular ski
resort both in winter and in summer, when hikers, skiers and
snowboarders take cable cars up to glaciers above the village.

“Everything happened very quickly and now we have nine
people dead,” Ernst Schoepf, mayor of Soelden, told Austrian
ORF television. “The block dropped on the cable, set it
swinging, causing one car to fall and the others to swing
around.”

The lift carried passengers between Rettenbach and
Tiefenbachferner, two stations in the sprawling ski area.

Austrian press agency APA reported that the helicopter was
flying the piece of concrete, weighing around 750 kilograms
(1,650 pounds), around 300 meters (yards) above the car’s
cables when the block fell.

Austria has around 3,000 cable cars and ski lifts,
transporting around 500 million people a year.

Almost five years ago, 155 people were killed when a
funicular ski train caught fire in a tunnel near Kaprun, 60
miles south of Salzburg, in Austria’s worst peacetime disaster.

(Additional reporting by Franziska Schenker and Iain Rogers
in Berlin)