All eight people rescued from stranded Pakistan cable car

South Asia
By Editor_1
People watch as an army soldier slings down from a helicopter during a rescue mission to recover students stuck in a chairlift in Pashto village of mountainous Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province - AFP
By Salman Masood, Christina Goldbaum and Zia Ur Rehman

PESHAWAR – All eight people, including six school children trapped for hours in a stricken cable car high above a remote Pakistan valley, were brought to safety late Tuesday (22), rescue officials said.

“The rescue operation has been completed. The two adults were the last to be rescued,” said Bilal Faizi, an official with the Pakistan emergency service

Pakistani officials were scrambling earlier in the day  to rescue seven students and another person left hanging dangerously for hours in a cable car high above a deep mountain valley after two of its cables broke.

In the hours after the accident, security forces were able to rescue five children from the car, according to the Pakistani military. Video posted on social media showed one scrambling out of the car and being lifted to safety by rope to a helicopter hovering overhead.

As night fell, helicopter operations were suspended because of bad light, said the local police chief, Tahir Ayub. Officials have instead employed a second, smaller cable car or trolley to try to rescue those trapped, according to local news reports.

The accident occurred around 8:30 a.m. in Allai, in the Battagram district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province. The cable car, which travels above a stream, is a regular mode of transport for residents of the mountainous northern region, and the students, including children ages 10 to 15, were headed to a nearby school. The car stopped about 900 feet above the ground, according to the National Disaster Management Authority.

As panic gripped the passengers and their families, they issued urgent pleas for assistance. Authorities sent an army helicopter to the site, and video on local television showed it hovering above the cable car at some distance as a commando slid down a rope and delivered food and water.

But as the helicopter tried to get closer to the cable car, the car seemed to begin shaking heavily, which appeared to make an air rescue difficult.

Before the commando delivered the supplies, one of the passengers told a local TV news network that he and the others had been stuck for more than six hours without food or water. He said that one child with a heart condition had fainted after panicking. “My mobile phone battery is depleting fast,” he said.

The cause of the breakage, which appeared to leave only one cable intact, was unclear. Anwaar-ul Haq Kakar, Pakistan’s interim prime minister, called the accident “alarming” as he ordered the rescue operation.

Kakar instructed the authorities to carry out safety inspections on all private mountain lifts to ensure their safety, according to a statement from his office.

“It is a delicate rescue operation,” Mufti Ghulamullah, the mayor of Allai borough, said in a telephone interview. “With each attempt to bring the rescuer closer to the cable car using the helicopter, the gusts of wind from the rotor would jolt and unsettle the chairlift, causing the children to cry out in fear.”

The incident has rattled residents in Pashto, a village of some 30,000 people in the remote Allai valley in northwestern Pakistan.

“They are in front of us but we are helpless — observing them and unable to provide any help,” Mufti Hasan Zaib, a religious scholar whose son was trapped in the cable car, said in a phone interview as he watched the rescue efforts from a nearby hillside.

Around 400 to 500 people use the cable car for commuting every day, residents say. Such locally built lifts, often improvised, are typically powered by petrol or diesel engines and are privately owned.

Maulana Qasim Mehmood, a local religious leader, said the incident was just a small glimpse of the daily vulnerability faced by people in the area. In the valley, home to tens of thousands of people, fundamental necessities like health care, education, transportation and other essential elements of life were absent, he said.

Allai was also badly affected by an earthquake in 2005 that killed more than 80,000 people and injured more than 100,000.

“As beautiful as this valley is, it holds many times more hidden sorrows,” Mehmood said. “The villages in Allai are several decades behind the global development standards.”

-New York Times

 

Editor_1
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