'Air surgery' at 3,800m: tourists rescued after night in cable cars over Alps
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Version 0 of 1. Dozens of tourists have been rescued after being trapped overnight in small cable cars dangling above the slopes of Mont Blanc in the Alps. Their return to land ended an extraordinarily complex and vertiginous rescue effort over two days amid the spectacular but dangerous landscape of western Europe’s tallest mountains. The last passengers were brought down on Friday morning after emergency workers managed to untangle cables that had jammed on Thursday, according to the mayor of the French town of Chamonix. The ordeal began on Thursday afternoon when cables on the Panoramic Mont Blanc cable car service got twisted, trapping 110 people in a string of cars at altitudes of up to 3,800 metres (12,500ft). French and Italian helicopters flew in rescuers who used cables to drop down on to the tops of the cars and lifted out passengers one by one. One of those rescued told the local radio station France Bleu Pays de Savoie that he had “closed his eyes for a few moments to avoid looking into the void”. “The extent of this rescue operation is simply unbelievable,” Colonel Frederic Labrunye, commander of the provincial gendarmerie group of Haute-Savoie, told Associated Press. “By the volume of people to rescue – we rarely rescue 110 people at the same time in high mountain – and by the environment in which it happened … in the heart of one of the largest glaciers in Europe, over a distance of five kilometres of cable with 36 cabins.” Helicopters had to carefully fly over the cables, which is risky itself, then lower a rescuer on to an area “not larger than a table”, and extract the passengers, he said, describing it as “air surgery”. As fog descended and darkness started to fall on Thursday evening, authorities called off the helicopter rescue and switched to plan B, Fournier said. Mountain guides identified the cable cars closest to the ground and used climbing ropes to carry passengers down one by one. The passengers were then escorted by foot to the nearest mountain station. Fournier said 65 people were rescued on Thursday and another 12 were brought down overnight. The remaining 33 people were in cable cars too high off the ground for plan B, so they had to stay there overnight. Children aged seven and nine from South Korea and a 10-year-old from Italy were among those stranded. “They didn’t get a lot of sleep, it was a strange experience, but they were warm under blankets and with their families,” Fournier said. Five rescuers stayed overnight in the cable cars and provided blankets, food and water to help weather the chilly night-time conditions. Kathy Cook, a tourist from Michigan who was carried down to the ground by a rescuer after almost 10 hours stranded, called it “really quite an experience”. “The helicopter rescue failed because the fog moved in, so we had to just wait and then they decided they could relay us safely to the ground, and we walked up the glacier to the hut,” she said upon arrival in Courmayeur. Police said all the remaining passengers seemed in good health when they were rescued on Friday morning. “We were in contact with them throughout the night, the people were cold,” but there did not appear to be any health emergencies, the local police chief, Stéphane Bozon, told Agence-France Presse The prefect of the Haute-Savoie region, Georges François Leclerc, said the rescuers had been forced to halt their operation at 8.45pm on Thursday as they could not “guarantee the safety of the pilots, rescuers and the people stuck in the cars”. The cable car ride, which offers spectacular views of western Europe’s tallest mountains and deep valleys below, connects the Aiguille du Midi peak in France, at 3,842 metres, to Pointe Helbronner in Italy, at 3,462 metres. The three-mile (5km) journey usually takes about 30 minutes to complete. The problem arose when cables got crossed for “unknown reasons”. Employees of the Mont-Blanc company were unable to repair them, according to its chief executive, Mathieu Dechavanne. The Vallée Blanche cable car runs during the summer season, when large numbers of climbers and tourists flock to the area. Another series of cable cars takes skiers and visitors to the top of the Aiguille de Midi year-round. The incident comes five years after about 40 people were stuck for nearly seven hours on the Grande-Motte cable car in the south-eastern French Alps after it broke down. They were evacuated through trapdoors in the floor of the cars and down ropes to the ground 40m (130ft) below. |