Nine people have been killed after a cable car disconnected and fell near the summit of the Mottarone mountain near Lake Maggiore in northern Italy.
The accident was announced by Italy’s national fire and rescue service, Vigili del Fuoco, at 13.50 on Sunday, with the agency saying over Twitter that a helicopter from the nearby town of Varese was on the scene.
The emergency services have confirmed that nine people died and another two were seriously injured.
According to a report in Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper, there were 11 passengers inside the car at the time a cable snapped sending it tumbling into the forest below. Two children have been admitted to emergency care. The newspaper reported that there were at least nine victims.
The cable car takes tourists and locals from Stresa, a resort town on Lake Maggiore up to a panoramic peak on the Mottarone mountain, reaching some 1,500m above sea level.
According to the newspaper, the car had been on its way from the lake to the mountain when the accident happened, with rescue operations complicated by the remote forest location where the car landed.
The cable car had reopened on April 24th after the end of the second lockdown, and had undergone extensive renovations and refurbishments in 2016, which involved the cable undergoing magnetic particle inspection (MPI) to search for any defects.
Credit: The Local (Photo Credit: The Local)
