Nine Germans die in Austrian cable car accident

By Alexandra Zawadil

VIENNA (Reuters) – Nine Germans, including six children,
were killed when a helicopter dropped a concrete block on a
gondola at a popular Austrian ski resort, emergency services
said on Monday.

The helicopter was carrying material to a mountaintop
construction site when it dropped the block, knocking one car
in a string of gondolas 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 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 spokesman for the rescue services said six children aged
between 10 and 15 were killed. Austrian news agency APA said
they were between 11 and 13 years old.

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

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

“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.

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.

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.

Broadcaster ORF said the public prosecutor’s office was
investigating the cause of the accident.

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