A preliminary investigation indicates that a connecting cable broke before Wednesday’s deadly funicular crash in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon that killed at least 16 people and injured several others.
A probe conducted by the Office for the Prevention and Investigation of Accidents in Civil Aviation and Rail (GPIAAF) found that a steel cable connecting the historic Glória funicular’s two carriages had “given way” shortly after they began their respective journeys along Calçada da Glória, the narrow street where the funicular operated.
A scheduled inspection had been conducted on the morning of the incident, which detected “no anomalies in the vehicles’ cable or braking systems,” the report, published Saturday, said. It added that it was “not possible” to see the condition of the section where the cable broke.
This resulted in the carriage at the top of the street increasing in speed down the slope and later derailing, GPIAAF’s report found. “The first collision occurred at a speed of around 60 km/h (around 37 miles per hour), with all these events having occurred in a timeframe of less than 50 seconds,” the report said, based on initial estimates.
No firm conclusions can yet be drawn regarding the exact causes of the incident as further investigation is needed, GPIAAF said.
Funiculars use a counterweight pulley system so that when one car of a funicular descends, the other car can ascend. The two Glória carriages had traveled no further than about six meters when they “suddenly lost the balancing force provided by the cable connecting them,” the probe found.
The report said that it was “immediately clear” that the cable connecting the two carriages had “given way at its attachment point” inside the upper car – the one that began its journey at the top of Calçada da Glória. A photo in the report shows a large, frayed cable on the ground.
When the cable broke, the report says that the upper cabin’s brakeman “immediately applied the pneumatic brake and the hand brake to try to halt the movement,” but these actions had “no effect in stopping or reducing the cabin’s speed, and it continued accelerating down the slope.”
In their current configuration, the carriage’s air brake and manual brake “do not have sufficient capacity to stop the cabins in motion without their empty masses being mutually balanced by the connecting cable,” the report added.
A woman sits next to a makeshift memorial honoring the victims of the funicular crash on Friday. – Pedro Nunes/Reauters
The rest of the cable and the pulleys through which it runs were “without apparent significant anomalies,” the report said.
In addition, the cable itself, which had been installed 337 days prior to the incident, was said to have a “defined useful life of 600 days.”
Among those killed in the incident were five Portuguese citizens, three Britons, two Canadians, two South Koreans, and individuals from Switzerland, Ukraine, the US and France were confirmed to have died, Portugal’s Judicial Police said in a statement Friday.
A full preliminary report into the incident is expected to be published within 45 days, GPIAAF said, followed by a final report within a year.
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