ID Process Begins on Cable Car Victims

Forensic investigators delved Monday into the grisly task of matching dental records and DNA samples with the charred remains of at least 159 people killed in a horrific ski cable car fire inside a tunnel under Kitzsteinhorn mountain.

As helicopters ferried the first 66 bodies to a morgue in nearby Salzburg, the U.S. Army acknowledged that eight Americans from military facilities in Germany had perished in the blaze.

Among the presumed dead were an officer from Texas along with his wife and two young children, a couple assigned to a medical brigade who had just gotten engaged the previous weekend and the husband and son of a civilian worker for the military who stayed at home while the others used the Veterans Day holiday to go skiing.

“Eyewitnesses from the group saw all eight get into the cable car,” said Capt. Paul Swiergosz, a public affairs officer from U.S. Army Europe headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany, explaining the certainty with which the Army decided that its missing ski club members were among the victims and that their relatives needed to be notified. “We need to help them get closure with this. It’s just so awful. I’ve got three kids myself and can’t begin to imagine what this is like for those families.”

The Army also sent a five-member forensic team to offer assistance to the Austrians, who were trying to identify corpses burned beyond recognition.

Shocked and grieving relatives have been asked for personal effects such as hairbrushes or razors used by the missing to provide DNA samples for identification, said Edith Tutsch-Bauer, chief forensic pathologist for the Salzburg area. It will probably take four weeks to complete the identifications, she said.

Firefighters and Red Cross workers descending to the gruesome scene inside the 2-mile-long tunnel had to spend nearly an hour to bring each of the first few bodies to the upper cable car station because of the steep incline, darkness and falling rocks loosened by Saturday’s intense blaze, said Maj. Franz Lang, head of the criminal investigation service of the Salzburg state police commandos, who is directing the recovery operation.

Railway engineers put together a sledge that could be lowered along the tunnel rails from the upper station, Lang said. Bodies trapped in the cable car wreckage will be difficult to recover, he said, because the carriage was melted down to the chassis, entombing the victims. Lighting and radio communications were set up for the emergency crews later in the day, speeding up work that officials here described as so gruesome that many of those involved had to seek counseling.

Authorities still had no clues as to the cause of the tragedy and were investigating all possibilities, Lang said.

The first account of the panic and terror by a survivor suggested a fire that spread quickly after the carriage occupants noticed it.

Gerhard Hanetseder of Austria told state radio that smoke was apparent in the cabin soon after the cable car began its ascent, then flames flashed among the passengers standing on the stair-like platforms above him.

“Then panic spread. We tried desperately to get the doors open. The panic got ever worse. In the meantime, the entire cabin was on fire,” he said, adding that one passenger used his ski boot to smash a window.

“I saw at the last minute someone jump out, so I grabbed my daughter and pushed her through and somehow got out myself,” he recalled of the chaotic scene from which he, his 12-year-old daughter and only 10 others managed to escape.

Authorities disclosed Monday that a man who was waiting in the upper station was pulled out by alert workers and saved from toxic fumes. Three other people in the upper station died of smoke inhalation. Authorities also said the driver of a cable car coming down the mountain to pick up passengers, which was empty because of the early hour, was among the dead.

One member of the recovery operation, Manfred Mueller, said communications between the cable car operator and a ground station ended with the operator being told to evacuate the burning transport.

“Open the doors. Get the people out,” a control room engineer told the operator by radio, Mueller said.

But an Austrian Transportation Ministry official responsible for all cable car services, Horst Kuehschelm, said that it had not yet been determined when or if the order was followed and that the answer might be difficult to ascertain because of the severe damage.

Local officials in this devastated Alpine village added four names to the list of those missing and determined the nationalities of most of those for whom they earlier had only names. The presumed victims are now listed as 92 Austrians, 37 Germans, 10 Japanese, eight Americans, four Slovenes, two Dutch and one person each from the Czech Republic and Britain. Nationalities remain unknown for four people on the list.

Operators of the cable car originally reported that the doomed carriage was filled to its 180-person capacity. With the three killed by toxic fumes at the upper station, that would leave 171 unaccounted for three days after the disaster. Officials explained the discrepancy between the 159-name list of presumed victims and the 171 possibly killed by saying that either the car was not fully occupied or other victims have not yet been reported as missing.

The American victims have been identified as Maj. Michael C. Goodridge, his wife, Jennifer, and their sons, Kyle, 5, and Michael, 7, from Texas; newly engaged Lt. Erich R. Kern of New York and 2nd Lt. Carrie Lynn Baker of Florida; and Paul A. Filkil and his 15-year-old son, Ben, who were living in Einsiedlerhof, Germany, with their wife and mother, Karen Kearney Filkil, the civilian employee of the military.