Recovery of cable car victims begins

By Compiled from Times wires

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 13, 2000

KAPRUN, Austria -- Evacuation workers struggling through Sunday night in a dark and cold Alpine tunnel began extracting the bodies of about 155 people, including eight Americans, who perished on Saturday when a cable car they were riding to a ski run was destroyed in an inferno of flames.

Relatives and friends who had waited through the night in this Alpine village began to get word Sunday on whether their loved ones were among the dead.

With the village hall draped in black and candles burning on shop steps, shattered townsfolk gathered in the Kaprun church for Sunday Mass.

As they mourned, others gave thanks after realizing their loved ones were safe.

"My son is, thank God, all right," Gottfried Nindl said. His boy had planned to go on the cable car with his friends, but didn't because they had slept too late.

The car, pulled on rails underground for most of the 3,200 yards up the Kitzsteinhorn mountain to a glacier region, stopped, blazing, about 600 yards inside a mountain tunnel Saturday. The cause of the fire has not been determined.

Rescuers could not reach the victims as the fire raged on. Passengers tried to flee through the deep tunnel, but most were felled by the thick smoke and flames. Eighteen people survived, mainly by fleeing downward in the tunnel where the smoke was thinner, authorities said.

It is unclear how many people were in the cable car, but it was believed that it had a capacity of 180 people and was full.

Emergency crews could begin entering the Kitzsteinhorn tunnel only on Sunday afternoon, after the tunnel had cooled and toxic gases formed by the fire had dissipated.

Franz Schausberger, governor of Salzburg, said the rescue work would continue through the night. He said the workers were entering the tunnel from above and through an emergency shaft about a third of the way down its mountain course. Other workers, he said, were trying to secure the remains of the cable car.

Because of possible damage to the cable that pulls it, there was a danger that the twisted remains could break loose and race down the track to the base, Schausberger said.

Once the remains are brought into town, authorities plan to set up a large tent where relatives and friends can say final farewells. From there, authorities plan to take the bodies to Salzburg for forensic examination.

Authorities said Sunday they had identified 155 of the victims with near certainty. Among them were 52 Austrians, 42 Germans, 10 Japanese, eight Americans, two Slovenes and a Croat.

The victims were identified by eliminating those who had returned alive from a list of 2,500 people who had taken the cable car up the slope before the fire.

Three U.S. Army personnel were confirmed among the dead. The Americans were part of a group of mostly military personnel from Wuerzburg, Germany, and their families, said Maj. Drew Stathis, a member of the group.

Stathis said missing Americans from the group included a family of four with two children, an engaged couple and a man and his son.

As evening fell, the village of 3,100 was unusually quiet. The few locals on the street were outnumbered by the hundreds of police and rescue officials.

Psychiatrist Thomas Kamolz, who talked to survivors, said they told him of someone inside the car breaking a window with his ski pole and a survivor who "saw a father throwing out his child" in order to save the baby.

- Information from the Associated Press and the New York Times was used in this report.

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