Questions Focus on Cable in Lisbon Funicular Crash

Images of recovery efforts in the crash of a funicular in Lisbon that killed 16 people on Wednesday could offer insight into potential causes of the accident, which Portugal’s prime minister has called “one of the greatest human tragedies in our recent history.”

A video of the recovery of the mangled cars, published on Thursday night by SIC, a Portuguese television channel, showed workers extracting an underground cable connecting the funicular’s two carriages. It appeared shredded and torn apart.

The Portuguese authorities have not yet commented on a cause of the accident. One of the agencies involved in the investigation that specializes in rail accidents said it would issue a statement on its first findings on Friday evening. But experts and firefighters quoted by local news media have advanced theories that a cable coming loose may have played a role in the crash.

The two cars of the funicular act as counterweights to each other, one climbing as the other descends, and are linked by a cable that runs through a pulley at the top of the hill. The two yellow cars, a landmark in Portugal’s hilly capital, can each carry about 40 people. During the trip, the cars pass each other midway along the route.

Witnesses said that on Wednesday evening, the carriage that was headed uphill came to a sudden halt a few yards from the funicular base, then fell back to the starting block. At the same time, the carriage headed downhill appeared to become untethered a few yards from the top, leading to a much longer, and disastrous, free fall that ended with a crash against a building.

The authorities have not confirmed the identities of the victims, but they included the carriage’s driver, André Jorge Gonçalves Marques, the Portuguese transport workers’ union said. On Friday, Portugal’s judicial police disclosed the nationalities of the victims, who included one American, five Portuguese, two South Koreans, one Swiss, three Britons, two Canadians, one Ukrainian and one French person.

“We will do everything so that from this tragic event we learn all the safety improvements to avoid similar accidents in the future, so that at least the sacrifice of these victims is not in vain,” Nelson Rodrigues de Oliveira, the director general of the Portuguese office that investigates accidents in civil aviation and rail said at a news conference on Thursday night.

“I know this is of small consolation,” he added. “But that’s what we work for, so that from these unfortunate events lessons are retrieved so it doesn’t happen again.”

The funicular is operated by Carris, the Lisbon public transport company.

In 2018, the same funicular line derailed without causing injuries. A car “simply came off the tracks and landed on the cobblestones,” the Portuguese newspaper Público wrote at the time. Carris described the cause of the accident as “a technical issue.”