Safety board says retrofitting would not have prevented fatal Swiss cable car accident
Retrofitting the clamps on the Titlis cable car gondolas would not have prevented the fatal crash of a gondola last week, according to the Swiss Transportation Safety Investigation Board. Every system is at its limit in strong winds, it said.
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“It’s pure physics and geometry,” Philipp Thürler, the responsible division head at the investigation board, told the Swiss News Agency Keystone-SDA on Monday. He thus confirmed corresponding statements in the SRF Tagesschau programme on Sunday evening.
Thürler told Swiss public television SRF that adjustments to the clamping mechanism would not improve safety. “If the wind speed is too high, a gondola comes off its normal axis and can crash into parts of the installation or get caught on rope catchers and be torn from the hoisting rope.”
In the accident on the Titlis on Wednesday, a 61-year-old woman died in the falling gondola. The gondola had detached from the cable between Trübsee and Stand and tumbled down the slope. The cable car manufacturer Garaventa suspects that one of the causes of the accident was a strong gust of wind that caused the gondola to collide with a mast.
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Prior to the accident, the railway operator had decided against a technical retrofit offered by the cable car manufacturer. Norbert Patt, CEO of Titlis-Bahnen, had already confirmed a corresponding report by the SonntagsZeitung newspaper to the Keystone-SDA news agency on Sunday.
“However, it was not a mandatory safety-related request for retrofitting,” Patt told Keystone-SDA. “I cannot tell you at this stage what the reason was that we decided not to request a quotation in 2022,” Patt continued.
Adapted from German by AI/ts
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