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- 20 years ago, a fire broke out at the bottom of the funicular in the Kaprun ski area, Austria.
- The train burns, 155 people die.
- The reason for the fire was the fan heater that we had converted ourselves – the oil and the filament from the fan heater were the deadly combination.
- The 16 defendants were acquitted in 2004.
On November 11, 2000, a fire broke out in Kiezsteinhorn, the popular Austrian ski area, at the bottom of the funicular. The train stops in the three-kilometer tunnel to the glacier plateau.
Markus Hiltel, 47, was leading a tour group at the time. They came to Kaprun with 49 participants, 20 of them died.
Hiltel is visibly excited when he talks about the accident. He himself was not on the train at the time. But his father and his girlfriend were on board. The friend died, the father is one of the few survivors. But he does not want to give an interview, his son says that his memories are too disturbed. With his last strength, his father was able to save himself. Since there were no emergency hammers on the train, the father broke a window with his skis.
Members of the rescue team look at the burned train four days after the disaster.
Keystone
The 71-year-old man escaped from the tunnel along with eleven other passengers, towards the tunnel entrance, where the smoke was not moving. They had to walk almost 600 meters down an emergency staircase, wearing rough ski boots and in the dark. “They grabbed onto a steel cable and kept falling,” says the son.
The Kaprun disaster is the worst disaster in Austria’s post-war history. To this day, there is suffering and the question of whether the 2004 acquittal is really the final legal word for 16 defendants.
The fan heater was rebuilt
“The glacier railway was a time bomb,” says lawyer Gerhard Podovsovnik, who defends the victims, still convinced. There were many illegal objects on board. The “Hobby TLB” fan heater manufactured by the Baden-Württemberg company Fakir, which according to the court caused the accident, was redesigned by the operators themselves and thus lost all certifications. “The fan heater was technically in perfect working order prior to the unauthorized conversion.”
On the glacier railway, which was converted in 1993, the conductors would have been frozen due to drafts. The fan heaters were installed in a completely unprofessional manner, right next to the oil pipes. Oil and the filament from a fan heater were a deadly combination, two journalists write in their book “155 – Der Kriminalfall Kaprun”.
The lawyer sees one last chance
The case is closed for Gletscherbahn Kaprun AG. For about 25 years, the funicular, which came into operation in 1974 and took skiers to the 3,200-meter-high Kitzsteinhorn area in eight and a half minutes, said spokesman Harald Schiffl. “That’s a great story” and a very safe form of transportation, they thought at the time.
The lawyer sees some possibility of resuming the civil process. Although there are no prospects in Europe, it is possible that something could be done through the American detour: eight victims came from there. When asked about the strongest impression of the court hearing at the time, lawyer Podovsovnik didn’t have to think long: “It was the failure of the Austrian legal system and the overwhelming power of the Austrian ski industry.”
