Investigators search for cause of Lisbon funicular crash that killed 17
Portuguese officials were focusing on establishing the causes of the crash of a Lisbon funicular popular with tourists that killed 17 people and injured more than 20, five of them seriously.
“The city needs answers,” Lisbon mayor Carlos Moedas said in a televised statement after Wednesday’s derailment.
The city centre streetcar, which is known as Elevador da Gloria and is a major attraction for tourists packing the Portuguese capital during the summer season, came off the rails during the evening rush hour.
The crumpled wreckage was cordoned off as investigators sifted through the wreckage, took photographs and pulled up a metal cable from beneath the rails that climb one of Lisbon’s steep hills.
Police, public prosecutors and government transport experts were investigating the causes, Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said, standing next to the mayor.
The company that operates the funicular service, Carris, said that it had also opened its own investigation.
It said that scheduled maintenance had been carried out.
As well as these, the mayor said he would ask for an investigation from an outside independent body.
The electric streetcar, technically called a funicular, is harnessed by steel cables, with the descending car helping with its weight to pull the other one up. The car can carry more than 40 people, seated and standing.
Officials declined to comment on whether a faulty brake or a snapped cable may have prompted the descending streetcar to careen into a building where the steep road bends.
Talk of possible causes was “mere speculation”, Mr Moedas, the mayor, said.
The government’s office for air and rail accident investigations said it was working with other bodies to establish why the streetcar crashed and would issue a preliminary statement on Friday.
Lisbon’s civil protection agency said earlier on Thursday that the death toll had risen to 17. It later corrected that to 16, saying there was a lapse due to the duplication of available information.
The dead were all adults, Margarida Castro Martins, head of the agency, told reporters. She did not provide their names or nationalities, saying that their families would be informed first.
The injured were men and women between the ages of 24 and 65, as well as a three-year-old child, she said.
The injured included Portuguese people as well as two Germans, two Spaniards and one person each from France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Morocco, South Korea and Cape Verde, she said.
The range of nationalities reflected how big a draw the renowned 19th-century streetcar was for tourists.
Locals also commonly use the streetcar, which goes up an 18% gradient.
Portugal observed a national day of mourning on Thursday after the capital’s worst disaster in recent history.
“This tragedy… goes beyond our borders,” Mr Montenegro, the prime minister, said at his official residence.
He called it “one of the biggest tragedies of our recent past”.
Felicity Ferriter, a 70-year-old British tourist, had just arrived with her husband at a hotel near the crash site and was unpacking her suitcase when she heard “a horrendous crash”.
“We heard it, we heard the bang,” she told The Associated Press outside her hotel.
The couple had seen the streetcar when they arrived and intended to ride on it the next day.
“It was to be one of the highlights of our holiday,” she said. “It could have been us.”
She said that the emergency response was “amazing.” Police and ambulances quickly “flooded in”, she said.
Although authorities gave no details about those killed, the transport workers’ trade union Sitra said that the streetcar’s brakeman, Andre Marques, was among the dead.
The 19th-century streetcar is popular for its short and picturesque trip a few hundred metres up and down one of the city’s steep hills.
Teams of pathologists at the national forensics institute, reinforced by colleagues from three other Portuguese cities, worked through the night on post-mortem examinations, which were expected to be concluded early on Thursday, officials said.
The injured were admitted to several hospitals in the Lisbon region.
“It hit the building with brutal force and fell apart like a cardboard box,” witness Teresa d’Avo told Portuguese television channel SIC.
She described the streetcar as out of control and seeming to have no brakes, and said she watched passers-by run into the middle of the nearby Avenida da Liberdade, or Freedom Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare.
Emergency officials said all victims were pulled out of the wreckage in just over two hours.
The service, inaugurated in 1885, runs between between Restauradores Square and the Bairro Alto neighbourhood renowned for its nightlife.
The Elevador da Gloria is classified as a national monument.
Lisbon’s city council halted operations of three other famous funicular streetcars in the city while immediate inspections were carried out.
Lisbon hosted around 8.5 million tourists last year, and long lines of people typically form for the brief rides on the popular streetcar.
European Union flags at the European Parliament and European Commission in Brussels flew at half-mast. Multiple EU leaders expressed their condolences on social media.
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