61-y-o woman killed when a gondola was blown off the cable on the Titlls Express lift just above Truebsee in Engleberg.
3 Likes
Wow. I find it shocking that strong winds are enough to blow a cable car off the cable, and knowing this, the cable car was still allowed to run.
3 Likes
another investigation into another scandal on the way
“Blown off” are my words, not an official description.
A bit more here
but I think it’s lost something in translation, where it talks about alarms being triggered I think it means there should be an alarm at 40kph and an auto shut-off at 60kph, not that they actually happened.
These gondolas use a spring-loaded clamp to attach to the cable..that allows them to “slowly” move through the stations for embarking/disembarking. For context only, here is a video on how they work. I can imagine this might be the focus of the investigation
4 Likes
Interesting mechanism. But I for the gondalas that just go up and down, there’s no need for this constant detachment/re-attachment so couldn’t something more secure that prevents detachment be used?
The point is that the gondolas move slowly through the station to let people on and off but then speed up on the cable to allow a relatively fast passage to the top statoin. Before these clamps were invented the goldolas (or almost always chairs) were fixed to the cable meaning you got a lovely whack behind the knees as the chair hit you but then moved at the velocity of a speeding snail for the whole of the journey.
On a separate note, I had the nice experience yesterday (at about that time) of sitting on a chairlift that had been automatically stopped by a wind gust (I realised afterwards) and not knowing (until I got off) that about 10 chairs behind me they had decided to close the lift. Bit of a bouncy ride up that was. Fortunately the strongest winds only affected the last 30m or so of the run.
“Pendulum” gondolas (like at Säntis) usually have fixed support cables (upon which the cabin attaches with rollers) but is fixed to to draw cable. Typically there are two cabins which counter-balance each other, one going up whilst the other goes down. These are high-capacity.
The advantage of the spring clamp is that they keep traffic moving, and cabins can be added or removed easily according to demand, reducing wear/tear and energy in off-peak times.
Statistics teacher would kill me because correlation is not causation.
Anyway, strong winds. I have zero experiences in cable cars, I just remembered a company that offers telemetry services for my work, also sells services to ski resorts (snow depth, lake depth, winds, temps, etc). My only experience here is that telemetry reduces, but does not make incertitude go away. The data displayed in a screen is a warning that should be interpreted carefully.
And the winter season was about to end in 5-6 weeks. During a week (or two?), the system is stopped, usual wear items replaced, and a verification is made to change other parts out of the scheduled maintenance. So, the system was much closer to the next scheduled check than the past one, a critical point.
1 Like
Engelberg lifts run all year round, barring a two-week stoppage in November, which is when they do all the annual maintenance.
The 2nd article you shared says twice a year.
I have put attention to these dates in past years. I love the mountain bike trails during the summer 
You are still more likely to die in a bike trail accident (I was run into from behind by a 15 yo last year) than being in a falling gondola.
I always feel a bit nervous on gondolas and chairlifts. Years ago on holiday in the highlands of Scotland we went on the chairlift at Aviemore, half way up it stopped as the wind suddenly got up and were suspended for 20 mins, it was horrible. I also didn’t like the gondolas up to Montjuac in Barcelona, you had to jump on whilst it was moving.
I nearly got knocked over in the middle of Basel last night, a JustEats delivery guy mounted the pavement and rode past in front of me as I was waiting for the traffic to pull up at a crossing (in the vicinity of where OH had his accident!) He seemed totally clueless as to where he was going.
Freak and rare accidents make the news.
It gives people a false sense of perspective of what’s dangerous and people generally seem to be quite bad at accessing real risk.
1 Like
I was not doing risk assessment, I’m only sad.
2 Likes
The company Garaventa, which produced the affected cable car, is commenting on the misfortune. CEO Arno Inauen informs on request that strong, gusty winds have prevailed at the time of the accident.
“According to the current state of knowledge, the affected vehicle was deflected by an unexpectedly strong gust to such an extent that it collided with a pylon and was subsequently torn from the cable,” said Inauen.