A cable car carrying passengers in a mountainous region of southern Turkey collapsed after colliding with part of its supporting metal structure on Friday, sending its eight terrified occupants tumbling to the rocky hillside below.
One passenger was killed, seven were injured and nearly 200 others were stranded in other cabins in the air, some for as long as 19 hours, as rescuers tried to free them from the crippled line.
Helicopters, cranes and hundreds of rescuers were dispatched to the area to evacuate a total of 184 people, including children, local residents and foreign tourists, who were trapped in cabins, some of them tens of meters above the ground in the Sarisu district of Antalya province, they said. employees.
The cable car usually carries passengers to a point high up the steep, tree-covered mountain, offering panoramic views of the hills, the city of Antalya, and the Mediterranean Sea. Friday may have been a particularly busy night for tourism there; the weekend began as Muslims celebrated Eid, the multi-day holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.
Around 18:00 local time on Friday, a pole that was part of the system broke off and hit one of the cabins, smashing the cabin and dropping the eight passengers inside onto the rocky ground when the floor they were standing on suddenly fell, Demiroren told the news agency. agency.
One passenger, a 54-year-old man, died at the scene and the other seven were injured, Demiroren said. Three more people were injured during the rescue operation, Antalya Mayor Muhitin Bocek told reporters at the scene.
Images from the scene showed the mangled car, floorless and windows smashed, hanging meters above the ground in the evening twilight. Other cabins—many with shaken occupants still inside—stretched before and behind him in a long row, hanging like little orange fruits from a vine above the rocks and trees below.
Tall cranes rose by some of the cars. At others, emergency workers wearing climbing helmets scrambled along ropes to reach trapped occupants and used metal baskets to remove the injured.
In one case, a female passenger wearing high-heeled sandals and carrying a small child strapped to her chest was evacuated with seat belts and slowly lowered to the ground. A rescuer waited in the cabin while it was evacuated while the other passengers waited their turn inside.
The rescuers succeeded evacuated 137 people overnight and into Saturday morning, and officials said they expected to complete the rescue operation before dark. At noon, passengers in five cabins were still waiting to be evacuated in what became a methodical and dangerous task.
“There is an unstable airflow and there is wind,” Okey Memis, the head of Turkey’s emergency agency, said in televised statements, adding that it made it difficult for helicopters to operate near the site. “The rescue work is taking place in a very steep area.”
Mr Memis said staff on the ground were in constant contact with stranded riders.
The prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into the incident, Turkey’s justice minister said, and experts have been appointed to determine the root cause and responsibility.
All 24 cabins of the cable car were in the air when the crash happened. Many of the small cars, each with a stated capacity of eight, carried both adults and children. Opened in 2017, the line starts near a picnic area and offers direct access to the observation deck, shops and summit cafe.
Mayor Bocek, whose municipality manages the cable line, said in televised statements that weekly and monthly maintenance on the cable line had been completed.
The last annual maintenance was carried out between February 19 and March 4 this year, said Deniz Yavuzilmaz, an official from Mr Bocek’s political party.
