Hours of anguish, with rescue operations complicated by the fog, and that cabin upstream from the Faito plant of which there is no further news, fueling the fear of a tragedy as time goes by.

A tragedy that actually occurred: 4 dead and one seriously injured is the toll of the accident that occurred on Mount Faito where, due to a broken cable, a cabin of the cableway that connects Castellammare di Stabia, in the province of Naples, with the summit, a breathtaking panorama at 1100 meters of the beauty of the Gulf, crashed to the ground, dragging with it five people, two couples of foreign tourists and the engineer on board, Carmine Parlato , a 59-year-old Eav employee.

The only survivor is a 30-year-old Israeli man, taken by helicopter to the Ospedale del Mare in Naples: his conditions are "critical". The passengers who boarded the cabin headed downstream were unharmed, however , as it remained suspended in midair about twenty meters above the ground until rescuers arrived and pulled the passengers out, harnessing them one by one. In their case, the safety brake worked, avoiding worse trouble.

The accident occurred shortly after 2:30 p.m. The news of the disaster was announced by the CEO of Eav, the Autonomous Body of Volturno that manages the cableway, Umberto De Gregorio: «The cabin upstream has fallen. There are fears of victims» the post on social media that arrived shortly after 6 p.m. and dashed all hope. Preceded a few minutes earlier by the announcement: «A tragedy».

The tourist facility - after the winter closure - had reopened its doors for the summer season only about ten days ago. The rescue machine moved in time but the search for the only missing person was complicated by bad weather and the blanket of fog on the summit of Faito, on the very day in which the Civil Protection declared a yellow weather alert starting at 2 pm due to the risk of storms.

To those who ask if the conditions were right for the cableway to operate regularly, De Gregorio responds as follows: "We have a very high-quality director of operations. Sometimes it closes in the presence of strong winds, evidently today he deemed that the conditions were not such as to impose the stop" .

The wife of the operator on board the cabin that fell was in tears, among the first to arrive at the scene of the tragedy. Also on site was the prosecutor of Torre Annunziata Nunzio Fragliasso: "We are in the preliminary phase of the investigation", he said, announcing the opening of a file against unknown persons. The crimes of negligent disaster and multiple negligent homicide are suspected .

The history of the Faito cable car is not new to accidents. The most serious dates back to August 15, 1960 when, due to human error, one of the cabins reached the valley without being able to stop its run, thus falling onto the underlying tracks of the Circumvesuviana railway line: also then there were four deaths, with 31 injured . After that tragedy, the system underwent various modernization interventions. And more recently it remained closed for work for four years, until the last reopening, which took place in 2016. Much loved by tourists, last year the cable car recorded 108 thousand passengers.

(Online Union)

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