A simple plaque in local stone, with the words "a perennial reminder" and the names of the fourteen victims. One year later, Stresa is preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of the collapse of the Mottarone cable car. The inauguration tomorrow, exactly where booth # 3 ended its mad rush.
Sunday 23 May 2021 it was just past noon when, around 12.30, the shock news bounced around the media around the world.
An icy breath on a hot sunny day, the first of trips out of town, for Italians, after the long months of imprisonment due to Covid.
In Stresa , a famous holiday resort overlooking the Piedmontese shore of Lake Maggiore in front of the Borromean islands, cabin number 3 of the cable car that takes you from the beach to the top of Mottarone is transformed into a coffin: a few meters from the last station, the towing cable to which is hanging it breaks and after being hauled back at high speed it collides with a pylon and falls into a wood.
14 die , only one child is saved, little Eitan , who has become the symbol of this disaster despite himself.
THE COMMEMORATION - Tomorrow will therefore be the day of the commemoration. There will be a private ceremony with the laying, in the place where the crash occurred, of the stele engraved with the names of the victims and in Latin the phrase "a perennial reminder". Then, a mass open to all in the arrival area of the cable car.
THE PROSECUTOR - An episode that is difficult for everyone to forget, even for the Prosecutor of the Republic. "Anyone who has been on top of Mottarone that day - the words of the Prosecutor of Verbania Olimpia Bossi - will always carry with them a deep sense of pity for those who have lost their lives in such a terrible and unjustified way".
The magistrate, one of the first to arrive at the scene of the accident to order the seizure of the plant on which the technical investigations are being closed to clarify the causes, says: "If I close my eyes I still see that scenario of immense pain made even more lacerating from the magnificent natural panorama ", which was the background. "We owe to all these people and their families - he adds - the research without preconceptions of the causes of this tragedy. This is what we are doing relentlessly".
THE INVESTIGATIONS - The investigations, in addition to the broken cable , which is very rare for a cable car, immediately led to the lighting of a light on the emergency brakes of the cabin: in the previous months, even before the reopening of the plant which had been stopped due to the pandemic , they had experienced some problems. In the documents of the investigation the word "fork" and the discovery that it had been activated in order to defuse the braking system appears. Three days later Luigi Nerini , owner of the company that manages the cable car, Enrico Perocchio , the operating manager and employee of Leitner , the company in charge of maintenance, and Gabriele Tadini the head of service, the which admits that it had been decided, also in agreement with his superiors, to insert the forks. For all three, the investigating judge does not validate the arrest, releases the first two and places Tadini under house arrest, a decision that is affecting the Supreme Court and the Turin Review Court.
In the investigation, which sees a change of investigating judge in progress and also proceedings before the CSM, the number of suspects rises up to 14, including Leitner herself and her leaders, and the investigations focus on sheared rope and forks.
EXPERTS - At the moment, without prejudice to the unfortunate insertion of the fork, it has been ascertained that the cable has been severed downstream of the cast head, just under a sleeve, never opened for checks. The two appraisals, one entrusted to mechanical engineers and the other to IT experts, must be filed by the end of June and then illustrated in the classroom on July 15th . Their outcome will allow prosecutor Bossi and prosecutor Laura Correra to draw conclusions with any "tweaks" to the register of suspects and to tighten the circle around who is really responsible for this tragedy.
(Unioneonline / vl)
