The Cavalese Cable Car Disaster of 1998 | Episode 69

Someone once said that skiing combines outdoor fun with the thrill of knocking down trees with your face. On today's episode, we will learn that skiing can do a lot worse things to your face than knock down a tree. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday History's most dangerous podcasts. Together, we're going to rediscover some of the most dramatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, see you'll forever remember the list of countries that make up the European Alps thanks to milk Gas. And we'll see how the North American concept of giving out awards regardless of merit actually began with the military. And if you are listening to this on Patreon, you would have also found out why you can't sell stupid moon rocks. We meet the single least likely and least prepared athlete in the history of the Winter Olympics. We find out who the funniest people roasting in Hell are, and we reveal how Google is trying to convince us all to poison ourselves. This is not the show you play around kids or while eating, or even in mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. You familiar with the old adage that the journey is better or more important than the destination. Well, when you are being figurative, well sure, And even when you're being literal, yes, sometimes sure, but not on today's episode. You won't get the relevance of that analogy just yet, but you will, so grab your ski wax, your fondue forks, and maybe some gum in case your ears start to pop. We are heading to the mountains of Italy, ah Bella, Italia. I think this is our third trip so far. Every time we've come here, though, I'm pretty sure something explodes. However, not today, I promise no. For today's story, we are heading back into the Alps or Dolomites. Wait the who They're mountains one of the greatest ranges of mountains in the whole world. Oh cool, got it? Well, I know we came here once before, but I can't remember the difference between Alps and Dolomites. Well, all Dolomites are Alps, but not all Alps are Dolomites. I think that clears that up nicely. See. The Dolomites are a range of mountains in northeastern Italy that make up part of the Alps. People love them. Thirty five million people come to this part of the country every year just to stare at them. And even though they don't get as much snow as the rest of the Alps, they're known for much nicer weather. So it is a very good tray. And according to UNESCO, they say that the Dolomite's beauty derives from a variety of spectacular vertical forms such as pinnacles, spires and towers, with contrasting horizontal forms like ledges, crags and plateaus, all of which rise abruptly above the extensive talus deposits and more gentle foothills. Again, clear as day, it's like you must have a painting in your mind, So just let all that sink in while we start our day in the town of Cavalaissi. Cavalisi's a small mountain village situated in the heart of the beautiful fiame valley. Picture a valley with alpine meadows, lush landscapes, and of course stunning mountain views, and yeah, you pretty much already got it. Ah, just smell that fresh mountain air with me, I mean, really sniff it in deep. There's less oxygen up here in the mountains, you know, at high altitude, and of course that means lower air pressure, which causes air to physically thin out. So bottom line, there's just air up here. And this won't make sense, but when you find yourself at a higher altitude where breathing starts to feel more like something between a conscious shore and doulping suffocation, ironically, you breathe better up here. Let me explain. If I told you that the key to health was breathing, you'd say, well, thanks, professor, that's great. I'll try to remember we're all lifelong inhalation hobbyists, and we're all pretty amateurish at it. Up in the mountains, you're going to be unconsciously breathing deeper, which really helps to inflate the lungs and stimulates the tissues, you know, all those little alveoli, and this really helps oxygenate your cells and it improves your blood circulation in a way that you just don't get sitting behind a desk all day. In Cavalisi sits about a thousand meters or about three thousand feet above sea level. It's way up in the top corner where the shoehorn goes, if that makes sense. It's about as close to Austria in the north as it is to Switzerland in the west, and it has a rich history dating all the way back to med evil times. It has a mixture of cobblestone streets, historic buildings, and traditional alpine houses that give the uninitiated and immediate feel for the history, art, and culture of the area. Actually, there's always been some kind of settlement here since the Bronze Ages, but Cavalisi itself began back in an age where priests would regularly get electrocuted while trying to scare off lightning. And I'm not making that up. It comes straight from our fourth episode ever, the Brescia Church explosion of seventeen sixty nine, which wiped out one sixth of an entire city and is conveniently only a two and a half hour drive from where we stand today. Did you NESCo have anything else to say about the area. Well, you know they love handing out those special statustades of nations, and there are two close by, both houses sort of. The first is Bouan Consilio Castle, which was built in the late medieval period and as promised earlier, will not be exploding today. The second are simply called the prehistoric pile dwellings of around the Alps. And yeah, that's really not much of a name. But you know those gorgeous thirty thousand dollars a night villa cottages that you see in places like Valley or the Seychelles and the Maldives, and they run along wooden planks and they sit on wooden pilings right above the water, you know the ones. I mean, well, these here are the originals. And if you see them in photos, you'll say, wow, they really just copied and pasted these all around the world as luxury items. But here they were just homes built on mountain lakes in the area around seven thousand years ago. And to give you an idea just how old they are, it has also been said that the wagon wheel was invented in this area, and that was said to be closer to thirty five hundred years ago. See history can be interesting, and it's all around us, even in this tiny little mountain village seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We've actually been to the Alps slash Dolomites before, and not much has changed. They still remained one of the most spectacular mountain ranges on the planet. They stretch about twelve hundred kilometers or seven hundred and fifty miles across eight different countries, and you're probably thinking, I can't remember which eight countries it covers, and that is okay, because I am here to help. I have made another helpful and memorable little anagram milf gas milf Monaco, Italy, Liechtenstein, France and Gas, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and Switzerland. There you have it, and now you will never have to forget the countries that make up the Alps ever again. Thanks milf gas. The last time we were here, in our White Friday Avalanche of nineteen sixteen episode, a whole lot of red stuff got sprayed on all those icy mountain walls. But we're honestly not here for bloody conflict anymore than we are for historical explosions. Now today will be different. For one We're here in an amazing part of the country with an incredible amount of things to do. Whether you're into skiing, snowboarding, ice climbing, mountaineering, hiking, biking, or even paragliding, there is a way to hand over money to do all of it. Cavallesi is accessible by road and is well connected to major cities like Trento and Balzano and has buses, trains and shuttle services to ski areas. But getting to the actual top of a mountain, well, we're here for a winter visit and we did tell you to bring your ski wax, so let's climb on mountain. But you didn't say to pack any climbing gear. Nope, and you're not going to need any today. Visitors to the Valle de Femi or the Fermi Valley area are comfortably whisked aloft to splendorous mountain views on state of the art lift systems. The Fim Valley boasts five different ski resorts, Alpay Surmes where will be staying, the Alpai de Pompiago, Predazzo, Alpay de Lucio, Paso Role and lavasse O Kleine. With apology for my pronunciations, we'll be visiting Alpay Sermese, which tops out at about six thousand feet above the village of Cavalaisi. To give you an idea how big European ski hills can be, the longest run back down to the resort is seven point two kilometers or four and a half miles. Fortunately for US, they have cable cars, those automatic hookup chairlifts that skiers kind of back into, and even one of those moving walkways for beginners, so no hiking for US. Cable cars sort of evolve from ropeways. Remember a World War II mountain disaster episode where entire battles were held while clinging to the side of frozen mountains like this, pulling cannons through thousands of feet at air by hand, then by horse, then by steam engine. Well, if you had a mine up a mountain, your options were to build a series of confusing and dangerous switchbacks for vehicles to try to ride up, or you could figure out some kind of system of bucketing or and winging it over the side, using the weight of one bucket to offset the weight of another, and creating a more expensive version of the kind of thing that a kid might make for a tree house. What started with ropes, became wires, which became steel cables, and today cable cars typically run along three cables. One that propels the car along we'll call that the haulage rope, and the other two are there for stability and support to keep the carriage out of trouble. So the real question becomes how safe is all of this? Well, by the numbers, you are eight times more likely to die in a plane crash, and the odds of that are only one in eleven million. And more to the point, planes crash for reasons that are completely out of your control, while almost everyone who gets injured or has died on a cable car did it to themselves avoidably. So. While planes have a double sided fold out in flight safety card telling you how to pose for death and how to turn your seat into a boat, cable cars require nothing more than a simple sticker saying don't be dumb. Anyways, we're here. It's a beautiful day, and the sun is shining, and the ski runs are already busy. Skiing is incredibly popular, and it's been that way for a long time. There are some really interesting and booty pop and cave drawings of early people skiing and bits and pieces of primordial skis found from as far back as eight thousand years ago. Just try to imagine the first time a human being ever found themselves standing on a long smooth stick and they began to slide and probably scream, first from fear and then from excitement as they realize they've just invented winter travel, and it was all downhill from there. The Sammi are the only indigenous people of Scandinavia and they are widely credited as the world's first ski team. Now Here is where our story gets messy. This year marks the one hundred and month anniversary of the Italian Air Force, and Italy's Aviano Air Force Base has been around just as long. Everything from rickety old World War arage loppies to state of the art fighter aircraft have called Aviano home at some point or another. It's owned and operated by the Italian military, but the US Air Force kind of Cato kaland their way onto base a long time ago, and they never left. They are NATO partners after all, so no harm, no foul. It's just part of their gatcha strategy that lets them always be at least a little bit in your business. Aviano is famous for a few things, but for the sake of spoilers, I'm just going to point out that it was being used as a kind of forward operating base for the US during the Yugoslav Wars. The what Yes, some of you are going to be too young to remember that Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Slovenia and Slovakia all used to be pressed into a single country called Yugoslavia, which they hated bitterly, and once the Union came on glued, they celebrated their newly found independence by slaughtering each other. From nineteen ninety one to nineteen ninety nine, about one hundred and forty thousand people were killed and another four million were made homeless. But back to Base was famous, but never more so than the fact that it was being used by NATO to enter into their very first combat missions in the region. On a cold February day in nineteen ninety eight, four American pilots set out from Aviano on a routine training flight around the Italian Alps. It was Marine Flight eight eighty six B, a Northrip Grumman EA six B Prowler. It was the first American military aircraft specifically designed for tactical electronic warfare. They were used for jamming enemy communications, gathering enemy intel, and blasting enemy radar sites ahead of regular fighter aircraft, and they were said to be an attacked aircrew's best friend. And unlike what you think of with fighter aircraft, this one sits four people in a side by side arrangement, one pilot, one navigator in the front, and two electronic countermeasures officers in the back. Early crews tried to encourage people to start calling the Prowler the chariot of electronic armageddon, but as we've said before, you don't get to pick nicknames. Everyone knows that, and the Grumman DA six B Prowler became known as the sky Pig. It was sixty feet long with a fifty three foot wingspan, and the crew were squeezed up front, roughly into the dimensions of a snug Dodge caravan. Their mission today was to practice low flying during combat conditions like three hundred feet above the ground low hoping you have a pleasant flight today would be thirty year old Captain Richard Ashby. This was his final training flight before being promoted to a full fighter pilot. Joining him was Captain Joseph Schweizer as his navigator. Joining them in back were the electronic warfare officers, Captain Chandler Seagraves and Captain William Rainey. Seagraves was a last minute addition to the crew. They had planned out a forty two minute flight around the mountains. And remember, back in nineteen ninety eight, being a navigator didn't mean watching the GPS for your turn. It meant interpreting charts and maps and marking the plane in relation to other landmarks. It was a lot more involved, and they were supposed to be flying over a lake, but somehow they made a course correction that brought them into a valley that they hadn't flown in before, the Surmese Valley, which forced Schweizer and Ashby to try to get their bearings. Oh and to my earlier point about picking your own nickname, Captain Ashby got stuck with the call sign Trash. The crew were flying so low that they couldn't keep contact with ground radar and they just disappeared off it entirely around three six. Try to imagine the experience. They're racing their way up this valley and they're passing mountains on both sides, and these are the kind of glacier fed mountains that slope and forest up to a point before they fade into rock faces, and then they are capped with incredible snow peaks. And the whole time you're doing this, you are sailing over crystal clear glacier fed mountain lakes. This is not an experience or a view that you could just easily purchase. It was wholly unique, and everything was looking great right up until three twelve when Ashby sees a yellow dot ahead. His immediate thought was, maybe it's some kind of optical illusion, you know, kind of a UFO A then identified flying object or floating object. Of course they've changed that to UAP now, which is unidentified aerial phenomenon. Okay, here's a phenomena for you. Do you know how much distance you can cover when you're traveling eight hundred and seventy kilometers in the time it takes to finish that thought a lot? And before he could barely get what out of his mouth, they were right up on it. They'd caught up to that dot so fast, and as it turns out, that dot is actually a brightly colored yellow gondola car there was zero time to react and no room to maneuver. Ashby banked sharply to the left to push the nose beneath it in hopes that they'll just glide right past it. Now, as we stated before, gondolas use wires to propel and hold themselves up. It's one of their defining features. The cables are made of strands, and each of those strands is made up of multiple wires, all twisted together. The individual wires vary in thickness, and they're made from high strength steel, which are strong enough to support as much as two hundred thousand tons of weight. Now the jetweigh more like thirty tons, but traveling eight hundred and seventy kilometers an hour, they avoided the gondola, but their right wing sliced through two inch thick hide tensile steel cable like a laser through butter. The fastest vehicle in that valley just hit the slowest vehicle in that age, and I believe this would have connected with the same destructive force as if it had been hit with about thirteen pounds of TNT. For comparison, Mike Tyson can punch with about seventeen hundred pounds of force. In anecdotally, it's like getting hit with a two hundred and twenty pounds avoue drop from five beef, which itself is the equivalent of getting hit with point one four to seven grams of TNT. I know, if you would like an I'd rather be punched by Mike tyson T shirt. Anyways, it all happens so fast they had no idea what kind or how much damage that they had just done, and immediately climbed in case they needed the space to eject. Remember, the plane hit the wire, but the wire also hit the plane just over forty thousand times harder than Mike Tyson at his angriest. The impact sliced into their wing and tail section or vertical stabilizer. It tore through gas and hydraulic fuel lines, which powered the jets' flight controls, even the landing gear, and they were dropping fuel like they were on Ozepic. They fought the flight controls to keep the plane in the air and the sphincters to keep their uniforms dry as they limped their way back to base on the scariest flight of their lives. All four men survived. Now to relign just a bit back in the valley. Let's talk about the people on that gondola. The fastest a gondola to move is about fifty kilometers an hour, but they generally go about thirty depending on the make and model. Now, the prowler approached them doing about five hundred and forty miles per hour or eight hundred and seventy kilometers, which was basically full throttle. That's a little over two thirds the speed of sound. Even at a kilometer away, they would have looked like a speck just over a tenth of a degree tall, and it's a little hard to picture literally and figuratively. At that speed, that little dot would have covered that distance in about four seconds, about as long as it took for me to just say that, And if my math holds up, they would have only really heard or seen the jet for not even two seconds. I can't imagine if people knew what was about to happen to them, but I know there's nothing they could have done about it. When the wire snapped, it lost tension, and everyone on board would have immediately felt the creeping pull of gravity as they were dragged helplessly into free fall. There were twenty people on board, and they would have had no hope of survival. Nineteen skiers and the cable car operator plummeted the height of a thirty story building and came to rest on the rocks and snow far below. So you're visiting a mountain and you opt for the cable car instead of the hiking trail, and it's warranty just expired? Would you know what to do? Surviving a cable car fall is an extremely rare and challenging situation. It's all your fault for not evaluating the safety records of the cable car company before stepping on board. So all I'm gonna do is tell you the best practices for what to do, but your ability to pull them off maybe limited by the specifics of your disaster. All that I can hope to do is increase your chances of survival. The scariest thing about cable cars, of course, is that by design, they are carrying you over things that you don't want to mess with in person. Rocks, cliffs, boulders, cacti, snakes, all kinds of things. First things first, you see sparks flying, or hear the grind of gears or cables, just try to stay as calm as you can. Panic kills intelligence and leads to poor decision making. And I'm afraid that once a car is en route, there is no evacuation protocol. The only thing you can evacuate is your bowels. If there are no seatbelts or harnesses available, grab whatever you can to try to stabilize yourself and keep yourself from being thrown around in the fall. And if you did fall during it, try to brace yourself. If you can curl into a ball with your arms covering your head and neck. This can help protect vital organs and even reduce the impact on your limbs. You want to do this in the center of the car, so you're not crushed by walls or pincushioned by glass or just tossed out a window. If you can control your fall, try to land on your feet with your knees slightly bent. This is the same method that people use parachuting to help distribute the impact from the landing and keep your hips from shoving up into your lungs. What you're going to try to do is as soon as you land, you're going to try to roll to the side to spread out the force of the impact across your body. Clearly, this would be incredibly difficult to control in a free fault situation, but we're not here to blackat any ideas. After the fall, you have to check yourself and others for obvious injuries like the sudden appearance of bones or bloud, and everyone will tell you it's pretty much best to stay exactly where you are and just wait for rescuers. Moving around always has the potential to worsen injuries that you can and can't see, and basic first aid knowledge can be crucial in the aftermath of a disaster, obviously, and I can't go into all of it right here, so I do recommend re listening to every episode that we have ever done. Like I said, surviving a cable car fall is largely dependent on the specific circumstances of the fall, like the height, the kind of terranu land on whether you're landing is at all cushioned by trees or snow, or even caught by a slope rather than spacking into a flat and rocky terrain. So while I've said that I can only improve your chances, these are only chances. And while I thank you for considering your safety ahead of time, I also wish you luck because yeesh. The thing people don't realize about cables and chains is how heavy they are. See. You think of a boat anchor as holding a boat place, but it doesn't. It's actually just the weight of the chain attached to it that does. So when you think of a two inch steel cable falling to the ground from a height, you might not realize that it would hit with enough force to deeply slice into the ground where it lay. The gondola itself was reduced to a flatten hulk, which needed to be dismantled to free the remains. Photos taken at the scene were described as grizzly, which is fair because the post fall gondola did not appear large enough to contain twenty bodies. The area was marked by a tremendous pile of snow stained blood, and the incident became known as the Strada del Sermese or the Massacre of Sermese, named after the spot where their bodies were recovered. The victims came from six countries from across Europe, eight Germans, five Belgians, three Italians, two Poles, one Dutch citizen and one Austrian. No one survived. So what happened, well, pretty much the moment they arrived at Aviano with a sliced wing and a fountain of fuel spring out of their side, an investigation was begun. NATO treaties gave the US jurisdiction over the investigation, but they decided they wanted to cooperate fully with the Italian authorities to determine why this happened. International media was quick to say that this was all the result of reckless flying and characterizing the pilots as daredevils looking to have some fun and not just reckless illegal in their maneuvers right up to the point of collision, the crew had broken multiple regulations. The prosecution revealed that the reason they went up the valley is because they were conducting an unorthodox role maneuver that sent them off course. Deviating from a flight plan. Is also a mass of no no, and yes, they were flying too fast and too low. According to the Ski Left company, they would have had to have been flying somewhere between two hundred and sixty and three hundred and thirty feet above the ground in order for this to happen. They were supposed to be practicing low altitude flight maneuvers, but the Italian government did not allow pilots to fly below two thousand feet in this region. The only question is whether they were doing it intentionally or not. Well, that was going to be up to a marine court martial. Ashby was charged with twenty counts of a voluntary manslaughter and one count each of destroying government property, destroying private property, dereliction of duty, and failure to plan properly full the flight. He faced up to two hundred and six years in prison. So Schweizer and his crew set out to clear their names. For one thing, it was clear that there was no denying that the thing that exploded off their hull was a cable car, and the thing was The pilots claimed that there had been no mention of cable cars in their morning briefing and no indication of them on their maps. Literally. Their argument was that they had not been made privy to information that was available in the lobby of the ski resort as a part of illustrated maps for kids. Ashby also claimed that their altimeter had been malfunctioning, because if they had been flying as low as claimed, they should have been receiving low terrain way warnings. Well, investigators looked into it and determined this was a lie, and a two star general came out and refuted their claims about the maps. It wasn't looking good for them. Investigators also found a video camera on board the plane. Well that was weird, I mean, was that weird? Well? Maybe Anyways, the tape inside it was blank, so I guess no one was using it and we don't have to worry about that. Fast forward to March of nineteen ninety nine and the court martial. Now, because this was a military trial, there's always going to be things left off reports and things that don't make it to the public's attention, you know, for reasons of national security. So what the families of the victims did not know was that prior to the accident, this flight crew had received warnings for top gun antics like barrel rolling and flying too close to obstructions before. If they had, they probably would have been even more upset. When the jury acquitted Ashby and the rest of the crew of wrongdoing, the Italian authority said, maybe we didn't get at the translation correct. How guilty did you say they were? And the Americans said, oh, to clarify, no, not at all. The Italian authorities described this as shameful and a punch in the gut, and that jury was made up of US military officers, which to the people of Italy fifty seven million of them at the time. It was a little like having the guy who stole your car sitting in your car while telling you to mind your own business. And now here is where we see something we never see on this show. He wouldn't recognize it. So I'm gonna call it personal accountability at least a little bit. Just watch this. See in the background, Rainy and Seagraves had done a bit of a run around and accepted a plea bargain to disclose additional information to the investigation. The camcorder on board that everything that happened the entire incident had been caught on tape. They claimed that Schweizer and Ashby were having a good old time while taken selfie videos. They were even doing a barrel role just to show off. Oh and because it's nineteen ninety eight, the video camera is not some sleek little phone. It's a big black retro style over the shoulder camcorder with a big ass battery hanging off the back. Selfies as a term you love or hate wouldn't become popular for another few years, not until phones got cameras with rear facing features, so man handling a giant block around the cockpit was where it was that. In their defense, Schweitzer said that they were only hot dogging because he wanted something he could show his kids one day. He said they were smiling and having a great time right up until the plane hit the wire, and he never ever expected that it was going to become public knowledge, let alone an international incident. It's a little like realizing you've made a nude video and oh god, they're going to put this on CNN. All of this must have been on their minds as they landed without exploding and realized, oh crap, we're going to live. You do not want to be seen leaving a plane after making a landing like that carrying a giant video camera, and they really didn't want to have to say nothing, so they chose to say nothing. Rainy and Seagraves got off the plane first, while Schweitzer and Ashby stayed behind and swapped the cassette with a blank. Schweizer later burned the original in a bonfire behind a bar that tape became the twenty first victim of the disaster. So there was a second court martial. And if you're thinking this is going to turn into a scene from a few good men, and you're chomping at the bit thinking a few not so good men, maybe let me say that TV and movies have done a terrible job teaching you about what happens in courtrooms. Both men were charged with obstruction of justice and conduct unbecoming of an officer. Both are found guilty and dishonorably discharged from the Marines, replacing their military benefits eligibility with prison uniforms. However, it was plea deals all the way down, and Schweizer avoided prison. Ashby, on the other hand, received a six month sentence at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, which is really kind of a bargain for killing twenty people, even through negligence and especially in a hit and run situation. Either way, they led them off after four months for good behavior, and that was in October. By November, he found himself arrested in a Las Vegas hotel for drunken, disorderly and getting into it with security. You ever see an Italian outraged. Well, you'd see a lot of them right about now. Is there anything less satisfying than being proven right about something wrong? The Italians were convinced the US was going to sweep this under the rug, and they didn't disappoint. Actually, most of Europe was on Italy's side here, but because they weren't emotionally involved, they described the verdict as hilarious. And the people of Italy didn't just grumble under their breath about it. They demanded the closure of NATO bases across the country, and it ended up getting so ugly that President Bill Clinton himself had to hop on the air to try to smooth things over. In May of nineteen ninety nine, a bill went up before Congress and washed ring to set up a forty million dollar compensation fund for the victims families, but I think it was also attached to a bill providing clean drinking water, so Congress waited a bit and then rejected it. They were obligated by NATO to pay damages, which they did because it settled the matter and it made sure that all of this ended here and now, because no one was really ever punished for the deaths, and no one was really punished for destroying evidence and lying, and no one in Italy really got any kind of closure of any kind. In fact, there's a word that I learned in Italian rencre It signifies a deep seated bitterness, resentment, anger, and ill will all from being wronged. And yeah, this applies here. This will likely sound crazy, but in twenty fifteen, Captain Schweizer was promoted to colonel. He got a huge attaboy and a pat on the back in spite of everything. Navy seals are taught to rub a little dirt into a wound. It's supposed to encourage clotting. And I couldn't find anything about adding insult to injury, but that might be in the JAG or PR training. People must have felt like they were reading this news on Planet Crazy or bizarro Earth. But you have to remember this decision came from the same people who gave a medal to the guy who shot down a RAN Air flight six point fifty five aboard the USS Vincennes in nineteen eighty eight. At the time, the media speculated that a RAN had filled a plane with dead bodies and aggressively flew it towards a ship and that same kind of thinking means you can almost hear pundas to crying the awful gondola for attacking the jet. Schweitzer said that growing up he'd always wanted to be part of something bigger than himself, and he was, and I hope he enjoyed it. Now I've heard from a lot of you who say how much you appreciate it that I try to do my best to see both sides of a human rather than just dog piling on the obvious guilty party in a disaster. So for you watch this. Did you know that when the pilots first returned to base, they tried to write a heartfelt apology to the families, but then the lawyers came and made sure that no one ever saw it. Well, based on all my research and speaking specifically about Captain Schweitzer, he may have been propelled up the food chain after the disaster, but his heart was never in it. It was broken and lived with a broken heart long enough, and it will damage your soul. Panic attacks, confusion, and anxiety until he was finally diagnosed with chronic PTSD, But he decided to try to find meaning instead of just living in the guilt. Written slog of simple survival. After the fact, he went on to become an expert in organizational ethics, and he teaches how to prepare for failure to junior service members. Take it from me, We all fail. But what you do with failure, how it lays you low or inspires, that's really all that matters. He's basically been doing everything in his power to rehabilitate his spirit and heal his soul. And I'm not always the best at separating the sin from the sinner, but in this case I do respect the work. This man was complicit in a lie that ended innocent life, and he compounded that sin by destroying evidence. And he learned the hard way that the problem with doing something wrong is that even if no one in the entire world ever found out about it, you would still know. And although in those moments you take in action you hope you can live with it, well, the reality is you'll only really know once it's too late. The Cavaleci cable car disaster was quickly coined one of the most gruesome peace time disasters in US military history. And now, if I may drum roll please, I would like to make things worse. Stay exactly where you are, and I'm just going to rewind the clock a bit there now here we are on the evening of March the ninth, nineteen seventy six. And if you're having trouble with the effects of time travel and you need an autograph, barf bag, just let me know. Now that we're here, the sun's getting a little low. It's time for people to start thinking of taking some final spectacular views of the valley as they head back down the mountain. For some app ray ski crowds of people queued at the gondola station waiting to board a descending cable car. This line ran for roughly five kilometers downhill and it had three stops Cavaleisi, a middle stop at Dos de Laici, and the last stop at the top of Mount Sermes. It was constructed in nineteen sixty four to improve Cavalisi's connection to the ski resorts. And it's always like this at the end of the day. As we established earlier, it's kind of a popular place because of the large number of people waiting to descend. Operators had an unwritten rule to try to cram each vehicle to capacity or beyond if possible, and I don't mean like stacking humans vertically. It's more like this. The operator of our cable car this evening is Carlos Schweizer. He's not really an operator by trade, he just works for the company. Well, he has a max capacity of forty people, and forty four people on the boarding platform, but fifteen of them were children age seven to fifteen. So okay, twenty eight adults minus Carlos and fifteen kids and fifteen kids is what seven and a half adults? Yeah, that's like thirty five and a half people, So yeah, all good. Schweitzer managed to get everyone on board like a Japanese subway pusher before beginning the cable cars descent. Now I'm going to repeat myself here to say that the system had two cables they used to guide and support the cabin, the track cable, and then there was the traction or the hauling wire. If you didn't remember it from the first time, don't worry, it's just more important for this story. The cabin is connected by wheels that run along the track cable while gripping onto the hauling cable, which again pulls everything, and a basic rule in this kind of configuration is it's important that the lines never touch or cross. If they did, they'd create an enormous amount of friction. Then they can heat up and fray or damage, even just for simple rubbing or chafing. Now cable cars have safety systems to stop the haulage cable from towing if this happens, so I wouldn't worry about it. It also has a system that forces cabins to slow down a bit as they're just about to roll over and pass one of the towers or the pylons that suspend the cable. The wires tend to slightly dip or sag under their own incredible weight, and then as they approach the pilons, they tend to rise up to meet them. Getting the wheels over the pylon can be a little like driving your car over railroad tracks. So they slow down to reduce the wear and tear. But slowing down also slows things down, and in the race to do the opposite, they had two options. You could try packing passengers in like a sardine can or a clilen car to reduce the number of overall trips, or you could maybe take a look at some of those safety systems. You know, maybe fudge with them a bit and see if maybe you could do a little stunt driving. Each trip takes about six and a half minutes from top to bottom, but if they sped things up as they approach the pylons, they found that they could shave about a minute off that time. My friend Mark used to drive a bus, and when he was in the mood, he'd look at all the passengers in his rear view and quietly say, everybody on this bus sucks, and then he'd softly tap the brakes to make all of them not in agreement. My point in the story being, the driver of your bus or uber or gondola can take you on any kind of ride that they like, and all they have to do is provide that you make it home in one piece. Well, it was about five sixteen pm Carlos's gondola was filled, locked tight, and sent down on its way towards the Middle station. Now the first hurdle of the descending car is the middle pilon, and it turns out Carlos liked both the aforementioned options and kind of dukes of hazardous way over the pylon at a speed around twenty two miles or thirty five kilometers an hour, probably about twice the recommended speed. And it's hard to picture, but because of the speed, the wheel assembly on the cables tends to jump a bit, which gives the cables a little freedom to move around. And in this case, because of the speed, the cables somehow managed to actually cross over one another, and this caused tension and horror and a separate cable safety system to kick in, grinding everything to a halt. Now Carlos was in charge, but he looked as scared and surprised as anyone because he really didn't know what was happening. See, Carlos was just a seasonal worker. He be placed in the role because it was necessary, not because he was properly trained or licensed as a gondola operator. We've seen the same kind of job title switcheroo in previous episodes. The cabin was deadlocked and he had no idea how to get this thing up and running again. The car did have a phone, and on the other end of the line was a voice that taught him how to bypass the safety system. Because this kind of thing happened a lot, they kind of asked him to turn it on and off again. So to speak. The cable car system was restarted and the cabin started to move again, but the engine pulling the hall cable powered up without realizing that the other two cables were still crossed over. And once it's started moving, the traction cable scraped across the static cable like an industrial nail file. With every second it was also adding way too much weight and exertion onto the static cable. Meanwhile approaching from the opposite direction on another cabin making its way to the top. The cabin operator, Giorgio Dimagtio, watched as the other gondolag got back underway, with sparks shooting out from the cables. He wanted to phone it in to warn someone, but his phone wasn't connecting, and just over a minute later, the track cable supporting forty four people wore through and snapped, and with it the cabin plunged into free fall. Passengers were forced to try to duck as the cable swung and snap back, smashing through the windows. And I don't use this term in every episode, but what happened next was egregious. The cabin fell about the height of a twenty story building, slamming into the rock with snow covered slope below, and because the safety stop system had been overridden, the engine winding the cable continued to turn, meaning imagine falling twenty stories slapping onto rocks, only to then be helplessly dragged across them. They continued in this fashion down the mountain side almost another seven hundred feet all the way to the banks of the Avizio River. If you remember our Orkney Elevator disaster of nineteen ninety five episode, you might remember that certain conveyances have a lot of machinery, heavy machinery, and it's always situated on top of the car. Same thing here. The top of the cabin had an overhead carriage assembly that weighed about six thousand pounds, and while being dragged across the rocks and overhangs, this overhead part of the cabin fell and further crushed it. Alessandro Piovsana was fourteen years old, and she became the only survivor for her. Luckily, she'd been in the front, which was the least damage part of the cabin, and she also found herself partially protect did from the fall and impact by the bodies of the other people on board. Some of which did actually survive the fall, only to be slowly suffocated in the debris under the weight of their fellow travelers. Forty three people were killed that day. It came from as far as southern Italy, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands for the worst day of their lives. The approaching cable car was on a different line and no one on board was affected, at least not physically. The whole world wanted to know how this could have happened. Without recounting the entire investigation, let's just say that the blame was pointed at cable crossover and overloading. They estimated that the wires had reached about thirteen hundred celsius or twenty three hundred seventy fahrenheit, and the analysis of the wires showed all kinds of gnarly burning, grinding and fraying and friction scars. The engineer in charge of the cableway said they'd considered something like this disaster impossible, but the investigation concluded that faulty operation and maintenance were the cause of the tragedy. But the blame wasn't going to fall on the company, Oh No, clearly was not properly trained for this job. He'd been instructed to override the safety system. But because they did this over the phone, because it didn't happen in writing, it pretty much didn't happen at all. It certainly didn't happen in court. The lift officials were all, what's a phone? They denied everything and slid Carlos's corpse under the bus. A lot of people retire from companies and hope that they get a gold watch or a pen. What Carlos got was a reputation for being at the helm of the world's worst cable car disaster. Officials went so far as to conclude that the Cavalisi cable car disaster of nineteen seventy six was the deadliest accident involving a cable car in the history of powered human travel. It's amazing, like amazing when a disaster actually repeats itself. I mean, not the disaster from our third episode, ever, the Coriali Stadium disaster of nineteen eighty, which seems to happen every couple of years. In that case, the cause is always alcohol. But in this case, there was nothing about the nineteen seventy nine disaster that could have informed or prevented the nineteen ninety eight disaster. I think about the similarities and the differences between Carlos Schweizer and Joseph Schweitzer. I think a lot of times in history, the first version of the truth is not the whole truth, and maybe even far from it. Captain Schweizer spent most of his life trying to make peace with what he had done in his dual role as survivor and perpetrator of a disaster. Carlo Schweizer, on the other hand, was just following orders, and he paid the ultimate price for it. It might even make you think that although you might believe it's the people closer to the tip of an organization that bear the most weight, truthfully it's more often the people nearer the bottom. And if it makes you feel any better at all, whatsoever. Two months ago, four people plunged from a malfunctioning gondola near Eagle Mountain Lake in Texas and were thrown against a rocky, cactus filled cliff face. They all survived. I mean, they were all terribly, terribly injured. But as long as I don't tell you the specifics of those injuries, as far as you know, they came away from the experience cartoonishly coated in cactus spikes. So there. I mean. It took a while, but at least one funny thing happened in this episode. If you are a regular listener, why not consider becoming a supporter. It would really help fulfill my dream of doing this full time, and if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really be helping keep the show and me alive. Before I tell you about Patreon, if you are into it but aren't looking for a whole relationship, you can visit buying me a coffee dot com slash doomsday and just make a one time donation. And those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place, and I personally think at getting episodes a little early with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it. And if you agree, you can find out more at patreon dot com, slash Funeral, Kazoo and now a quick but heartfelt shut out too, the incredibly aptly named Daniel Thunderbird, James kwood Chad o'latte, rain Woodcock, Malaika Williams and Dan Jones for helping support the show on Patreon. You can reach out on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. I do love hearing from you, but here I go telling you I'm a little slow respond but but no word of a lie. I have been much better this month. Older episode can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave us a review and tell your friends. I always thank my Patreon listeners, new and old, for the support and encouragement. But I also say, if you can spare the money and had to choose, I ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises, and they're often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot CAA on the next episode, so you're shopping for a new disaster, well, England is a disaster of sorts, and if you think people are unhappy living there now, you should have been there during the Manchester Woolworth's fire of nineteen seventy nine. We'll talk soon. Save the goggles off, and thanks for listening.