By Elisabetta Povoledo
Rome: At least four people were killed when a cable car plunged to the ground, rolled down a mountainside and broke apart on Monte Faito, south of Naples, Italian officials said.
A fifth person was in a critical condition, according to Luca Cari, a national spokesperson for Italy’s firefighters. “These are very ugly situations,” he said.
Rescuers recover the body of one of the victims after a cable car carrying tourists plunged to the ground near Naples, Italy.Credit: AP
The cause of the crash on Thursday afternoon, Italian time, was not immediately clear.
The nationalities and identities of four of the victims, described by officials as tourists, were not immediately released. One victim was an employee of EAV, the public transportation company that manages the cable car, officials said.
Nine people became trapped on another cable car that had stalled lower in the valley, near the town of Castellammare di Stabia, because of the crash, Cari said. They were rescued by firefighters who managed to bring them to the ground one by one using harnesses.
Prosecutors in the nearby town of Torre Annunziata, which has judicial oversight over Castellammare di Stabia, have opened an investigation into the crash.
More than 50 firefighters were involved in the rescue operations. Some worked to remove a piece of cable that had fallen on a local railway and onto the roof of a house, according to a statement by the firefighters.
Bad weather conditions – high winds and fog – made rescue operations difficult “even on foot”, Vincenzo De Luca, the governor of the Campania region, which contains Monte Faito, told the national broadcaster, RAI.
De Luca said the cable car was important to the local tourism industry. It travels from Castellammare di Stabia, population 66,000, to a plateau rising more than 1000 metres and offering breathtaking views of the Gulf of Naples and Mount Vesuvius.
A cable car carrying tourists south of Naples crashed after the cable snapped, killing at least four people in Castellamare di Stabia.Credit: AP
In 2021, 14 people were killed when a cable car crashed near the top of a mountain in the north-western region of Piedmont, Italy. The cause was determined to be a snapped cable and an emergency brake failure. It was Italy’s deadliest cable car disaster since 1998, when a US military jet severed the cable of a ski lift in the Dolomites, killing 20 people.
Umberto De Gregorio, chair of EAV, described the latest crash as an “unimaginable and unpredictable tragedy”. Speaking to RAI, he said that the cable car had begun operating for 10 days before the crash, with the start of the tourist season after a winter hiatus.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.