155 victims in Austria at the end of the millennium
There are different opinions about when the new millennium began, in 2000 or 2001. As a convincing argument in favor of the second option, I heard the example that the second case of vodka begins with the 21st opened bottle (when the first case contains 20 bottles). Also, the year zero never happened in history, so the second option is better. But some fans celebrated this Millennium holiday two years in a row.
There were many fires during the 20th century, and at the very end of the century, such an incident occurred on a significant date (November 11, 2000), which is easy to remember. I attribute this incident to the end of the old millennium.
Report The worst disaster in the history of ski resorts
They were saved by a man who ordered them to run towards the fire. Twelve skiers climbed through a window of the burning train, broken by a ski pole, and descended, clinging to the flames, while 150 others ran upward, away from it, toward the light and salvation. But within minutes, everyone who had chosen the obvious upward direction was dead.
That Saturday morning, the funicular's inclined tunnel acted like a 3-kilometer-high chimney. Survival was possible only against instinct.
It happened on November 11, 2000, in Kaprun, a village of 3,000 in the Salzburg region, at the foot of the Kitzsteinhorn Glacier.
The opening of the season, Saturday, in dazzling weather. At 9:02 a.m., a train carrying passengers and a conductor departed the lower station of the funicular. An hour later, only 12 of them would remain alive.
This disaster would claim 155 lives and remains the deadliest rail accident in Austrian history and the worst disaster in the history of the ski industry.
The glacier funicular opened in 1974. The nearly 4-kilometer-long track ascended from the valley station to the Alpine center at an altitude of 2,450 meters. First, 600 meters along an open-air trestle, then 3,300 meters in a 3.5-meter-wide shaft cut into the rock, without lighting, with a narrow service bridge along the tracks.
The gradient reached 26.5 degrees. Two trains traveled on the same track, heading toward each other, passing at a siding in the middle, and suspended by a common cable, balancing each other. A winch at the top pulled one train upward, while the second train assisted with its weight.
The trains even had names: Gletscherdrache (Ice Dragon) and Kitzsteinhams (Kitzstein Chamois).
The trains had no engines on board. The conductor in the cab had no control. He closed the doors, communicated with the dispatcher, and made sure passengers had a more relaxed ride on the virtually autonomous train.
In 1994, the trains were replaced by new tram-like cars (29 meters long, four cabins, 180 seats). They also included hydraulics with 160 liters of oil for the brakes and doors, electrics, and heating. The conductors complained about the icy draft blowing through the tunnel, so heaters were installed in the cabins. They weren't certified for transport, but rather household fan heaters, the kind you could buy at any store. The manufacturer wrote on the box: "For bathrooms and living rooms." The unit didn't fit completely into the lower cabin, so the installers disassembled it, breaking the seals and, as investigators would later determine, removing the overheating protection. According to the instructions, any unit with broken seals was supposed to be thrown out.
Something else entirely was ordered. The buyers requested Doma heaters, which had already been approved and were installed in another Austrian funicular. They weren't available by the deadline, so someone bought what was on the shelf. The disassembled heater was mounted in the wall of the control panel next to the hydraulic lines, and covered with a wooden casing, which also hid the lines from view.
There were no smoke detectors. Fire extinguishers were in the locked conductor's cabins. There was no emergency door release for passengers. The windows were made of impact-resistant acrylic. Mobile phone service was not available in the tunnel.
This construction traveled downhill for six years. On the morning of November 11, 2000, people from eight countries boarded the lower train. Austrian schoolchildren with their coaches, German families, a group of deaf athletes, 10 Japanese, and eight Americans from a military base in Germany with their children.
There was a snowboarding event at the top that day, so there were especially many young people traveling. Thirty-one of the future victims were under 18. Nineteen-year-old German Sandra Schmidt, the reigning freestyle world champion, was traveling with her parents, as well as coaches and juniors from the German Ski Federation.
Part of the children's group from the ski club didn't fit into the carriages, and two adult chaperones with a nine-year-old boy were left waiting for the next train. This accident killed them. The next train was fatal. Ten-year-old Christian Kreutzberger, his father, and his five-year-old brother had left on the same train on the previous train, half an hour before the fire. A quarter of a century later, he told reporters that his mother had kept his ski pass since that day, as a mascot.
The fire started before the tunnel. A hydraulic fitting was leaking in the cabin at the lower end of the train. Drops of oil had been clinging to screws inside the control panel for years, unseen behind the wooden casing. The heater fan sucked in the oil mist, heating the metal inside to over 600°C, and the mist ignited.
One of the survivors later assisted the investigation. Smoke, resembling an extinguished candle, was noticed immediately after the train departed. But no one was alarmed. The train passed the entire overpass and entered the tunnel, its control panel already ablaze. Within seconds, the fire had burned through so many hydraulic lines that the pressure dropped to zero, triggering the automatic safety device. The brakes, which maintain the oil pressure, were now firmly locked.
The lower train came to a halt, 530 meters from the lower portal. Oil from the broken pipes spurted under pressure, sprayed, and burned.
Experts at the trial will compare this to a flamethrower. And since both trains were hanging on the same cable, the second train, descending toward them almost empty, also stopped. It was carrying the conductor and one passenger.
The conductor reported a suspected fire to the Alpine Center. He was ordered to open the doors and report again. But he couldn't report anything anymore. The fire had burned through the 16 kV power cable running along the tracks, and the entire resort, including the tunnel, the train, and the upper station, was plunged into darkness.
Without hydraulic pressure, the doors wouldn't open. Panic broke out in the packed carriages. People slammed their ski boots and fists on the acrylic glass, installed long ago for their own safety. And the glass held.
Flames were already pouring out of the cabin. In the rear compartment, closest to the fire, passengers near the service bridge smashed a window with a ski pole. A handful of people climbed out. Among them was a Bavarian construction worker named Erwin, who had served in the volunteer fire department for 20 years. And he did something that makes this story worth telling.
He convinced the others to walk down, past the burning car, through the smoke, across a narrow catwalk in complete darkness. Austrian Gerhard Hanazeder, one of the twelve, later recalled the crush and suffocation in the last car. There was no fire extinguisher, no contact with the conductor. These twelve people (10 Germans and two Austrians) squeezed past the flames and, coughing and stumbling, tumbled out of the lower portal onto the overpass. All twelve survived.
Around 9:10 a.m., the doors finally gave way, and most of the passengers climbed out of the cars. Their instinct told them what it would have told anyone: the fire is below, meaning salvation is above, where the train is already heading, where the station and the people are.
However, during a fire, the inclined chimney turns into a chimney. It sucks in fresh air from below, driving heat, toxic gas, and the flames themselves upward. And the smoke moves many times faster than a person running in ski boots.
According to reports, an explosion soon swept through the tunnel. Of those who went up, not a single one even reached the siding halfway down. Firefighters would later count over 60 bodies in the last 50 meters above the train. People suffocated as they ran, in the darkness, stumbling over each other. The fire came later.
Many people died in the cars, unconscious from the gases before the doors opened. The smoke then reached those in the tunnel and above who had not even been on the burning train.
The conductor of the second train was later found dead in his cabin. His only passenger had left the car and, for some inexplicable reason, walked down a short distance, toward the smoke, where he died.
A column of gas rose up the shaft to the upper station with such speed and pressure that it blew out the windows and began filling the Alpine center. Two employees noticed the smoke early and herded the visitors toward the exits.
The doors swung open, and the draft intensified. An exit appeared near the chimney. The fire door, which had closed automatically, had been manually opened by one of the escaping people and remained open. Almost everyone managed to escape, except for four.
Firefighters in breathing apparatus carried out one unconscious man and resuscitated him. He was the only person rescued all day. Three died at an altitude of almost 2,500 meters, not from the fire, but from the smoke.
Soon the fire alarm sounded. One of the firefighters, hearing the alarm, looked up at the mountain through binoculars and saw black smoke billowing from the slope. By this point, 155 people were already dead.
And the entire gigantic operation that followed was not a rescue, but a body count. The Red Cross reached the lower station before the firefighters, but no one could enter the tunnel. The heat wouldn't even reach the equipment.
The station in the valley was evacuated because rescuers feared a separate nightmare. If the fire burned through the cable, the train would plummet down the tracks.
At 9:35 a.m. on the 10th, the cable snapped. The train didn't move. Either the brakes were tightly clamped, or the heat simply welded it to the tracks. By 10:00 a.m., the first of eleven helicopters landed at the station.
A total of about 1,500 people worked in the village of 3,000 that day. 771 firefighters, nearly 350 Red Cross staff, 25 doctors, 270 police officers, 150 soldiers, psychologists, mine rescuers, and coroners.
Firefighters, arriving from the way station in the afternoon with special long-lasting breathing apparatus, walked to the train across the heat-ravaged bridge and saw what one of them described as a sight they would never forget. The road up was littered with the bodies of the dead.
A headquarters had been set up in the gymnasium above. Police had cordoned off the valley and were checking the documents of those leaving against their hotel lists and sold passes, compiling a list of the missing. Survivors were required to report and register.
Many recalled the evening as "surreal." Some people stood in line to officially declare themselves alive. Others didn't know the fate of their loved ones because communication had been lost.
The governor had already said at a press conference that afternoon what everyone already knew. There would be no survivors except those who had escaped on their own. A three-day mourning period was declared across the country. A helicopter dropped seven boxes, each containing 25 bags for storing bodies and their remains.
Overnight, railway workers cobbled together a cart to transport the dead along the tracks. The fire had left so few bodies that identification took weeks, through DNA testing and items from hotel rooms.
A television crew offered a firefighter 5 million shillings, about 360,000 euros, for a secret photo of the burned-out train with bodies. The firefighter refused and later told the story himself.
The last dead were carried out of the tunnel four days later. 150 passengers and five employees died. 92 Austrians, 37 Germans, 10 Japanese, 8 Americans, four Slovenians, two Dutch, a Briton, and a Czech.
Sandra Schmidt and her parents were killed. Josef Schauper, a disabled seven-time Olympic medalist, died along with his deaf alpine skiing teammates. Three coaches and four juniors from the German Ski Federation. Two ski club chaperones and a 9-year-old boy who hadn't gotten a seat on the previous train.
The burned-out train was pulled out of the tunnel at the end of January, and a week later, the surviving second train, covered in soot but intact, was also lowered down. Both trains were taken to Linz, and the fact that the trains were identical was a boon to the investigators.
The burned-out train was almost impossible to identify, and its systems were analyzed using its twin. A discovery awaited the investigators in the twin train that chilled even them. The same pipes were leaking in the second train. The same drops of oil hung in the control panel, near a similarly modified heater. Both trains were time bombs, and the only question was: which one would detonate first and how many people would be trapped inside.
The train was unlucky at the bottom of the tunnel, at the worst possible point. If the train had stopped on the open overpass, experts generally agree there would have been few or no casualties.
The official conclusion cited a faulty household fan heater as the cause, but everything else was blamed for the disaster. Flammable oil on board, missing sensors, inaccessible fire extinguishers, doors without emergency releases, a tunnel without lighting or exits.
In the summer of 2002, a trial began against 16 defendants: the operator's managers, Ministry of Transport officials, technical supervision experts, installers, and those responsible for the Alpine Center's fire doors.
The trial lasted almost two years, and it was a peculiar parade of evasions. An employee who bought the heaters at the store explained that he hadn't been told what they were for. The purchasing department wasn't at fault because he ordered safe ones for his home and didn't know about the replacement. The key line of defense was the argument that a funicular without an engine is legally not a train, but something like an elevator or simply a room. Therefore, their unsuitability for transport did not oblige them to do anything.
The same argument explained why the train legally contained flammable liquid and no rescue equipment.
The fact that breaking the seals and removing the thermal protection made the devices illegal anywhere, be it on a train or in a bathroom, was not included in the verdict. None of the participants had actual instructions from Fakir. The documentation contained instructions for devices that were never purchased for home use.
In February 2004, the judge acquitted all defendants. In the final verdict, the court found that the fire was caused by the installation of four unsuitable heaters, two of which had been modified. However, no personal guilt was proven.
Relatives greeted the verdict with shouts in the courtroom. Roy Challis, the father of the only British victim, called the incident a grave miscarriage of justice for all 155 people.
The German newspaper Der Spiegel headlined: "God's Acquittal. If no one is guilty, then a higher power remains the defendant."
Then the legal machinery futilely wrought out all that remained formally. The court in Linz upheld the verdict. A separate case against the heater manufacturer ended in nothing. In its untouched form, the device met all standards for residential premises. The Strasbourg Court of Human Rights refused to hear a complaint against Austria for lax cable car regulations. The father of one of the victims won a single-handed settlement with the operator for 220,000 euros. And the settlement specifically stated: "Without admission of guilt."
An American lawyer filed a class action lawsuit in New York. The court refused to hear it due to lack of jurisdiction. The lawyer himself ended up bankrupt and had his license revoked.
Later, the relatives signed a settlement agreement for 13,900,000 euros, an average of about 30,000 per person, pledging not to sue again.
The lead defense lawyer later became Austria's Minister of Justice, and the head of the investigation became head of the federal police.
Meanwhile, the village was experiencing its own quiet history. Six months later, 155 wooden crosses were erected along the road to the lower station, one for each person. Three days later, a local resident came to the police and knocked down the crosses with his car. His child died in a fire, and he couldn't bear to drive past this reminder twice a day.
Psychologists would later call the state of the resort during those years a collective trauma. Hotels closed, the slopes deserted. The village, which had lived off tourism, froze in stupor for months.
On the fourth anniversary, a memorial was unveiled. A concrete parallelepiped with 155 vertical stripes of colored glass cut into its long walls. The color of each stripe represented the five feng shui elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. A small window at the end looked directly onto the tunnel.
The funicular never operated again. There was a plan to use it to transport cargo: 600 tons of food up and 130 tons of garbage down annually. But the idea was abandoned. And in 2006, both trains were scrapped.
Gondolas have since been used to transport skiers to the glacier. The overpass and lower station were demolished, and the lower portal was welded shut. The gutted tunnel still sits in the rock, and the cables and pipes inside have been repaired and are in use.
The windows of the former station at the Alpine center were boarded up after visitors began reporting seeing a sleeping train in the dark. In fact, they saw the platform fence.
The rules for funiculars and cable cars were rewritten: fire detectors, illuminated tunnels, non-flammable materials, evacuation routes.
Sometimes the most logical instinct to flee from danger becomes a death sentence. Physics knows no mercy. Remember that. Perhaps this story and knowledge of the laws of physics will one day save someone's life. |
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