Cable car emergency brake disabled?

How could that have caused the cable to break?

That was the other problem.

Amazing.

I could understand disabling the emergency brake to get it down, empty, for maintenance, but what on Earth made them think it was okay to carry on running it, in passenger service, like that?

Indeed. Most safety features are not needed until there's a fault.

The poor 5 year old kid is being brought out of an induced coma today, and at some stage somebody is going to have to tell him his entire family has been wiped out. Grandparents, parents, sibling.

There was a time in my early teens when being told that would have made my day....

The point of the emergency brake is that the cable car is lifted up the the main 'unbreakable' possibly dual support cables by a relatively vulnerable, thin and wincheable cable which is vulnerable to wear and mechanical misadventure. I'm sure you knew that.

How could that have caused the main 'unbreakable' cable to break? And what has that to do with the emergency brake?

The puller cable snapped. The emergency brake should have clamped the car to the support cable, except it had been disabled.

So, the cable car ran downhill on the support cable, until it reached the pylon, doing around 100 kph, at which point it jumped off the support cable.

Ah, so the 'unbreakable' cable didn't break'. the car - supposed also to have things to stop it happing, jumped off it...

Sorry I am oddly uninterested in this whole incident after my comment in the DE that 'this is what comes of employing coke sniffing pop stars instead of competent engineers' was disabled.

The winching cable broke. While this probably related to poor maintenance it is not automatically criminal negligence because the lifting cable can be damaged so all cable cars have an emergency brake to stop them sliding back down the main cable at increasing speed until they crash. QED.

Yes. I do hope his other grandparents, uncles, aunts or whatever are well known to him and can take care of him.

Since this was an instance of owners knowingly operating equipment in an extremely dangerous condition for profit your comment was less apposite than in other recent Italian disasters.

The ones that disabled the safety brake were engineers. You can describe these engineers how you wish.

They probably though elfin safely was a joke act too. What's your thoughts on H&S? Is there too much, or too little?

I suspect if you had your way there would be no need for a safety brake, just one unbreakable cable.

In fact your statement exactly bears mine out. Money was not spent on competent engineers who could have fixed the problem. It should not have been possible to operate the car with the brake disabled, It should not have been possible for the car to overspeed with the drive cable broken, and it should not have been possible for it to jump off the cable under fault conditions

This is exactly like early lift(elevator) problems where a safety mechanism that catches the lift if the cables break was mandatory

My impression of having been to Italy is that it is a disaster already.

One mitigation for all this may be Covid, curiously enough. The winter sports season was lost, due to lockdown, so the lift operators may have been desperately short of money to get engineers in to fix things.

Still, it was a huge risk to take, even for a day. To leave it like that for weeks was utter madness.

I get the impression that the support cable did not break, but the driven cable did. That should have resulted in the car being held in place on the support cable by the emergency brake. However since that had been knobbled, it basically was left to run down the cable at an ever increasing speed until it was flung off the main support cable at a pylon.

Yes but you're a misanthrope.

Bill

Unlikely. They will have been mechanics or technicians - Engineers would understand the safety aspects.

We weren't there; the technicians may have disabled the safety brake so the