Cable Car Plunges, Killing 20 in French Alps

On a sunny morning in the French Alps, a cable car transporting workers to a high-altitude space observatory Thursday inexplicably became unhooked from its wire and plunged about 260 feet to the ground, killing all 20 people aboard.

For this placid rural hamlet of 545 people--whose economy is linked to the observatory, the largest of its kind in Europe--it was a dazing, painful blow that residents were still trying to cope with long after sunset.

Waiting for the bodies to be brought to the village’s square-steepled church for a mass viewing, women sat on chairs on the other side of the main street holding one another. The mayor tried but couldn’t keep back his tears.

“People from my commune, from the villages around, have been working for 15, 20 years to build the cable car, to build the observatory,” Jean-Marie Bernard said Thursday. “Everything was going well, jobs were created, families were able to live, thanks to this cable car and observatory.

“Then overnight, for a cause we don’t know at the hour that I’m speaking to you, a catastrophe happens,” he said, his voice thick with sorrow and bewilderment.

“We didn’t have a single scratch on our pinky in Kosovo,” said Eugene Rougny, whose 55-year-old brother Michel was among those who died, alluding to the lack of French combat casualties in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s recent air war against Yugoslavia. “And now we have 20 deaths on the Pic de Bure.”

The disaster on the nearly 9,000-foot mountain was the worst of its kind in France in at least three decades and followed an appalling winter in the Alps. Because of extraordinarily heavy snowfall, a series of avalanches crashed down in areas from France to Austria, including fast-moving walls of snow in February that swept away two hamlets near the French ski resort of Chamonix, burying alive 12 people. Soon afterward, a fire devastated the historic heart of Chamonix, about 270 miles southeast of Paris, causing at least $4 million in damage.

On March 24, a day most of the world’s attention was focused on the start of the U.S.-led air war against Yugoslavia, a fire broke out in the Mont Blanc tunnel that links France and Italy. In the confines of the tunnel, flames spread from a Belgian truck transporting margarine and flour, engulfing dozens of cars and trucks. At least 41 people died.

Officials trying to establish what happened Thursday in this village about 40 miles south of Grenoble said the private cable car--which transports employees and visitors to the observatory operated by France, Germany and Spain atop Pic de Bure--set out with 20 people aboard, all of them French.

Among them were five employees of the Institute of Radio Astronomy, nine construction company employees, four technicians for a French telecommunications firm and two workers from a cleaning company--including Rougny’s brother.

The car takes 20 minutes to reach the observatory, which boasts five dish antennae, each 50 feet in diameter, that recently detected an object 14 billion light-years from Earth. Villagers in Saint-Etienne-en-Devoluy said they gave no more thought to riding the 18-year-old cable car than Parisians do to catching the Metro.

But about 7:30 a.m. Thursday, within 500 yards of the lower station, the car’s metal arm became detached from the cables, said Remi Caron, the government prefect for the area.

Employment Minister Martine Aubry, one of two members of the French national government who flew from Paris to investigate, said the cause could have been “a problem of traction, of braking or of the wind--we don’t know anything.” She said the cable car had passed a safety inspection last year.

With nothing holding it aloft, the cabin plummeted, crashed onto a grassy plain dotted with evergreens and disintegrated as it rolled. Many of the bodies were mangled from the impact and tumble, which sent jagged metal flying like shrapnel.

Francois Florette, an engineer with a French research institute on safety, said either the connection between the cabin and the eight-wheeled carriage above it that rolls on the cables may have broken, or the carriage may have been dislodged from the wires.

An employee of the construction company who hadn’t made the ascent to the Pic de Bure because of an errand said he heard a resounding noise after seeing off fellow workers.

“We raised our eyes because we thought it was in the [ground] station itself,” he told local radio station Alpes 1. “And then we saw the car had come unhooked.

“I could have gone up and had a bite with buddies, but it wasn’t my day, that’s all,” he said.

What Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement called a “frightful drama” was the most deadly accident of its type in France in more than 30 years. In October 1972, seven technicians died when two cable cars they were testing crashed into one another. In 1988, during another test, eight people were killed in a cable car accident in Vaujany, in the Savoy region of southeastern France.

Thursday evening, gendarmes on motorcycles were still escorting family members to identify the dead at the accident site.

Villagers stood outside the City Hall, which was kept open, and mounted a vigil for the arrival of the coffins.