The Kaprun Funicular Disaster of 2000 | Episode 102

If you think that the worst thing that can happen while skiing is trying not to scream while the ski patrol figures out why your leg is bending that way, we have a lot to teach you about skiing. Mountains can cook and kill people, so don't say that this podcast doesn't teach you things. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of, bizarre and awe inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you will learn why Frankenstein was more graceful on stolen corpse feet than you are in snowboots. You'll learn why diagonal tunnels basically act as nature's secret logistical flame throwers. And we'll see how a forty dollar appliance permanently derailed a thirty million dollar a year alpine operation and changed European history. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would hear about the industrial accident that unearthed the entire history of humanity in Western Europe. You would hear about all the terrible things that happened to the last King of England to die in battle, before and after he actually died, and spoiler, most of those injuries were after and if you didn't know the story, we would tell you how Dionysus gave Damocles PTSD. 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. To my listeners across Europe, may I extend a happy bonchour, guten tag o, la hey, and bon journa, And to my North American listeners, a hearty red goolaw. And you know what that means. Mountains, and not just any mountains. We've been to some of the greatest mountain ranges in the world on this show, the Rockies, the Andes, but today we are returning to the most glorious range in all of Europe. And what are the greatest mountains in Europe? You ask, Well, the first time we visited the world famous Alps. They seemed too large to be real. We love them because they dwarf us so thoroughly. They make whatever your favorite city is look like a Petri dish. They make us feel small and temporary, and you could dry your eyes out dangerously staring at these things. Of course, the last time we visited the Alps, it was in the middle of World War Two, and soldiers were hauling cannons straight up the sides and blasting away at each other like they were fighting the Battle of Hof but vertically. The Alps formed over millions and millions and millions of years as Africa slowly rammed itself into Europe, which buckled the land into jagged peaks. This happened right where the Tete Sea used to lay, and today, amazingly, even way high up in the peaks, you can find marine fossils. The Alps are older than human memory, and nothing much happened there for millions of years until people caught up all in their business, and over the last hundred years or so they have become famous as the birthplace of alpine skiing and modern mountaineering and cute little mountain villages. The Alps contained thousands of peaks, and among non Europeans, the most famous of them is the Madder Horn in Switzerland. You might recognize it as the mountain from the toblarone box and it was first successfully climbed back in eighteen sixty five. But on the descent one of the climbers slipped, pulling three others with him and they all fell to their debts. So the first time someone really challenges it and it says no, thank you, goodbye. So they started calling it the murder Horn. And here is the thing about dying on the murder Horn. It's exposed on all sides, kind of like a pyramid. So if you accidentally take the express route down, your death will be remembered as a very public affair and will not go unnoticed. But fear not, for no one is falling off of anything today. Naturally, the Alps eats up a lot of real estate. It stretches all the way from France on the Mediterranean, across eight different countries to Slovenia, all the way in Eastern Europe, and we are going to be spending our time today in the Eastern Alps. Grab your climbing shoes, your favorite later hosen and a comically long Alpine horn. Because today we are heading to Austria. Ah, Austria. It's not a huge country, of course, most countries in Europe aren't. You could fit Austria into Australia ninety two times. And of the land that they have, about sixty percent of it is covered by mountains. But they have made the absolute most out of what they have. Austria is the land of mozarts and Schwarzeneggers and Schnitzel and strudel and the sound of music suggest bathe it all in. We're going to find ourselves spoiled with storybook alpine scenery, turquoise lakes, farmland and valley towns full of wooden chalets and church bells, surrounded by impossibly green pastures. Lower down, the slopes are green and calm, with grass and trees, which fade away into gray rock with white snow as your eyes climb their incredible heights. Wherever you look, broad mountains stacked against the sky make up the majority of your view. Today we are going to spend our time in the Joe towern National Park. It's the third largest national park in Europe, only behind one in Norway and Sweden, which are an ormits themselves because they have protected landscapes that are already wide open and empty. The mountains here are the highest and most dramatic part of the Austrian Alps, and they're also home to the largest collection of glaciers in this part of the continent. And we'll come back to that. Of the thousands of peaks available, we will be spending our time hugging and sniffing Kitsteinhorn. It isn't known for being the biggest or having the most technically challenging ascent, but that is why people love it. It rises to thirty two hundred meters or ten thousand, five hundred feet, which, even though that makes it only bid tier by height, Kitsteinhorn is top tier by popularity. We're going to stare at the thing for a bit, and we begin our journey in the town of Kaprun, which it rises deeply behind and is forever linked to. And what makes this part of the country so popular is the kitstein Horn Glacier. So okay, let's take a step backwards. About twenty or twenty five thousand years ago, after the Ice Age, the planet warmed and glaciers really only survived where they could find shade, and this area has shade and it has been home to icy build up since all the way back in the early Pleistocene era about two point six million years ago. Because of a fluke of geography, Kitsteinhorn protects its glaciers, which as a result means that Kitsteinhorn offers year round skiing without a single crampon or ice axe required. It may very well be the most approachable high mountain in all of central Austria, which makes it the first high alpine experience for millions of visitors every year. In a single day, for the price of a lift ticket, you leave the warmth of the valley below, watching cow's graze while sipping coffee beside a glacial lake, and arrive in a world of ice and wind and bare rock and one quarter less oxygen, but with a three hundred and sixty degree view of snow capped peaks stretching in every direction. That is a remarkable feat available few places on our planet. People have been trying to climb Kitsteinhorn for about the last one hundred and fifty years, but it wasn't until the nineteen fifties that marketers started selling it as a place for year round skiing. Of course, those early skiers had to earn every foot of descent by climbing the thing first with their skis strapped to their backs. Asking people to crawl up ten thousand plus feet is not the easiest pitch. So imagine the joy that washed over people's faces as they announced that they were installing at Gletscherbong. I know, right, if you've somehow missed that term your whole life. A Gletcher bond is a general term for cable cars or gondolas, or any non foot based way of moving people up a mountain. It opened in the mid nineteen sixties and ferried gracious people up to the languid Boden Plateau about nineteen hundred and seventy five meters or sixty four hundred and eighty feet up the mountain. And it was great, but it could not keep up with the growing crowds. And have you ever had the pleasure of riding in a gondola in the wind. It provides a feeling that I would call life threatening. Before long, people were already thinking there had to be a better way. So what is the most futuristic and difficult thing that we could do. A funicular is a cable driven train designed to climb very steep slopes. The roof and windows and doors are all slanted, and the floor is terraced, kind of like stairs, if you can picture it. Each train was split into several compartments and would carry about one hundred eighty passengers at a time. The trains were about six Dodge caravans long, and if this had been made out of Dodge caravans, it would have been closer to carrying about forty people. I know what you're thinking. Taking a funicular up the side of a mountain sounds like an impossibly bumpy ride, and it would be, but they had a much more ambitious plan for it. Any kind of transport up the mountain is always prey to avalanches or all kinds of weather related nonsense. So instead of going over the mountain, they had planned to go through it. And we will come back to that too. The funicular would leave the valley station, head across the valley and enter the mountain around sixteen hundred meters or fifty two hundred and fifty feet up, and once inside it would glide upwards around thirty six kilometers or twenty two miles per hour up and through the mountain at a thirty degree angle. I checked it out, and if you wanted to hit that angle on a treadmill, you would have to hit the incline button about fifty four times. Once inside the tube, they would run thirty nine hundred meters or twelve thousand, eight hundred feet, which at that angle, when you do the math, says that they would gain about eleven hundred meters or thirty six hundred feet in altitude, all in about eight and a half minutes. As achievements go, this would have really pissed off anyone who had spent six hours climbing this thing on hand and foot. The way the funicular worked, it was actually two trains counterbalanced on a shared cable and winched by a pulley. Having this thing and all of its weight propelled by a motor in a confined space would have been insanely taxing and loud, so instead, a mass of winch pulled one train up the mountain while the other descended, and vice versa. One train was called the Glacier Dragon, while the other was the Mountain Goat. The whole project was insanely ambitious and unprecedented, But first they just had to build it. Think about the most difficult thing that you have ever built, and multiply that by about eighty seven hundred percent. Tunnel boring machines weren't going to work, so heavy equipment had to be hauled up, and the tunnel was painstakingly excavated by hand using drill and blast techniques. And in case you're not looking forward to going into work today, imagine having to stand on steep, wet rock with your tools and equipment constantly trying to slide out and away into the valley below. The drilling and blasting noise would have been brutal, and the smoke and thus created had a much tougher time of clearing than it would in a regular tunnel. The tunnel was unlit, and other than the track, there was only a small maintenance catwalk covering the cables and pipes that provided electricity and water to the Alpin center above. Debris was removed and the tunnel was reinforced as they went to prevent rock falls and dey formation, and after four years of this, the Koprun funicular was open for business, carrying passengers even further up twenty six hundred and forty meters or eight thousand, six hundred and sixty feet to the new Larjewe station and Alpin Centre. Today's story takes place bright and early on a beautiful day, November the eleventh, two thousand. Today is the opening day of the Kokprun winter season, and we will be joining about three thousand skiers and snowboarders and sightseers. Opening day is always a busy day, with people riding chairlifts on the glacier and in restaurants and service buildings, and of course bushing down the wide frozen planes of the Kitstein Horn. People are happy and excited to be here, and some of them are even setting off firecrackers to celebrate, you know, just the little kinds that you light and toss. And if you're thinking, oh no, well don't worry. TV and movies have done a terrible job of teaching you how avalanches work. And to confirm I made a whole point about how Kisteinhorn is open year round, but November the eleventh just marks the opening of the official winter season. We will be joining one hundred and sixty one people, everyone from tourists and families with children, all the way to Olympic athletes as we catch the first train of the day. When it first opened, this was the first funicular of its kind anywhere in the world. But by nineteen ninety three they took it and threw it in the trash and it was improved and modernized with a sleek new model. And that is what we'll be taking today. At nine o two am, the attendant closes the automatic doors and the train pulls out of the Valley station on its way to our final destination, which is a high altitude complex with viewing areas and shopping and restaurants and access to the slopes. Of course, as we said, as we leave the lower station, we first cross over six hundred meters or two thousand feet of gorgeous alpine ravine on our way up to the Mountain Tunnel entrance. More than a thousand people use this train every day, and I am happy to tell you it has maintained a perfect safety record to this point. Dot dot dot. So we're on our way up. Spirits are high, everyone's excited to get their skis on, and we're hanging out by the attendant's cab in the back of the train. The attendant only sits in the cab facing the direction we're traveling, so the cab at the back is currently empty. Thomas Krauss is standing with us. He's a tourist from Germany, and we've only just left the station. We've done maybe twenty meters or sixty five feet when Thomas spot something near his feet. It's a little wisp of smoke, like maybe somebody had dropped a cigarette, but obviously smoking was prohibited in a relatively air tight tube for safety reasons. Maybe it was a mechanical issue, or from overheating brakes, or maybe a minor electrical snafffoo who knows. There wasn't really a lot of time to ponder it before that whisp became a whiff and it started seeping into the rest of the car. It doesn't take long for others to notice and start to become agitated as the smoke gradually increases, and it continues to grow steadily in this way until passengers start to become so worried that they start banging on the rear wall of the car to try to alert others, but no one can hear them, and it turns out there are no smoke alarms in the train, so the attendant at the front has no idea what is happening. A passenger pulled out a cell phone to call for help, and at that exact moment, the train completes its trip across the valley and plunges into the mountain tunnel, and the cell signal dies in his hand. We watch as the light from the valley disappears behind us through the empty, smoky rear attendant cabin, so we have no way to call for help or alert the driver. As the smoke continues to build, and at this point we can start to see the orange glow of flames flickering from beneath our feet. As if that wasn't scary enough, about five hundred and thirty two meters or seventeen hundred and fifty feet into the mountain, the train grinds to a halt. At this point, the control room, who had been monitoring our progress up the mountain, rings up the driver to find out what's going on, but it wasn't his doing and he doesn't have any answers. Meanwhile, at the back, it's bad enough that the smoke is continuing to thicken, but it doesn't have a very comforting or woodsy smell. It was thick and acidic and aggressively unnatural. It had the sharp, choking smell of burning plastic and oil and electrical wiring. It smelled foreign and chemical and physically distressing. It's one thing to have a smoke detector or a pa to call for help, but as it turns out, there is also no emergency release for the door, and that is definitely something worse. Smoke and flames are by now visible in the tunnel, which causes panic in the other compartments, and finally clues in the conductor. Passengers are banging on the windows and pull and pry at the rubber door seals, but they won't budge The doors off are hydraulically sealed, and the only manual release is on the outside. Some of the passengers, including a construction worker named Peter Hubert, again stabbing a window with ski poles, only to discover that's not glass. It was shot proof acrylic plexiglass, which is designed to not go anywhere. But they're not giving up, and in time they are able to break a small hole through it. At last air except no, they had frenzied their way through the plexiglass, only to discover that the window was double paned with a second plate of plexiglass that they still had to get through, and right on queue open flames burst into the cab. The people were terror struck with literally nowhere to go. The attendant at the front reported the fire to the control room and they tell him to open the doors and report back. But without pneumatic pressure, nothing happens. See right as the call was made, the electrical system in the tunnel failed, which plunged everything into darkness, and along with that, the intercom dies in his hand and all contact is lost. This is about as bad a set of contributing circumstances as we have ever seen on this show. On the one hand, not all hope is lost, but on the other were not done. Highly motivated passengers finally were able to smash away a few windows and began pouring out of the train as fast as they could. You and about a dozen other people had gotten off the train. You're standing in the extremely narrow tunnel in complete darkness except for the lantern light of the fire that is raging all around you. People stood choking, paralyzed by the smoke, unable to move and you have to decide do I go up maybe twenty seven hundred meters or one point seven miles, to where most of the oxygen is being replaced by smoke in toxic gases and heat, or down around six hundred meters or two thousand feet back to the start, but only after walking past the flames. Among the group is a volunteer firefighter who I believe was named Irwin, who convinced the other passengers to follow him downhill. It would be hard enough in the dark trying to navigate the narrow catwalk with the disorienting smoke and the slipperiness of everything, but they also had to do this in ski boots and skates are too swimming, as ski boots are to walking in literally any other situation. They are atrocious. They're heavy and bendless, and Frankenstein was more graceful on stolen corpse feet than you would be in ski boots, and worse, up or down, you are doing all of this stumbling across rails and narrow and extremely steep emergency steps. The escape was agonizingly slow. One man got his boot stuck in the rails and thought he was going to die until a stranger came and managed to free him. And because I have not mentioned any new or potentially dangerous complications in almost an entire minute, I should mention that the flames and smoke were not the only thing that was hurrying them along. They were all very aware that the burning train was supported by a cable that could melt and snap at any moment, sending forty tons of flaming metal. Not to mention the weight of all the screaming people inside roaring down the tunnel directly above them, turning them into memorial speed bumps. When the evacuees finally emerged from the tunnel into daylight, they're exhausted and terrified, but alive. They escaped a steep, enclosed tunnel in near toime little darkness, filled with dense and toxic smoke and extreme heat, and completely disoriented, with no sense of distance or time. For the record, that time was over an hour for the quickest people. It was almost two hours for some, which by my map would have felt as long as an eighteen hour international flight. Several people collapsed near the entrance and had to be evacuated by responders who were already heading up the track on foot. All the way across the valley on a steep angle while wearing heavy rescue gear. If you're wondering who is having a good day today, the answer is no. One twelve people were now safe, but we still have another one hundred and forty nine passengers plus the train attendant still trapped inside the tunnel, which by now had escalated into a kind of roaring inferno. One hundred rescue vehicles, including twenty two rescue helicopters, brought over five hundred firefighters to the scene, but as they approached, they were forced to abandon the attempt. What they found was a train engulfed in flames and a tunnel that looked like the entrance to Hell, and it had no written all over it. It was completely inhospitable to human visitors. And they also realized the train was hanging above them like the sword of Damocles, and they were in serious jeopardy of being high speed waffle pressed to death before crashing into the valley below. When the power lines had melted and everything went dark, it went dark across the entire mountain. Workers at the Alpin Center tried frantically to restore the power, but they didn't know why it went out in the first place, and they were on a clock because the center was filling with thick, black smoke. One report said that the smoke racing up the tunnel had enough velocity and pressure to actually shatter glass. Workers and visitors were forced to run for their life before they suffocated, and of course, without power, all of the doors stayed open, which only provided oxygen for the flames, and before long the station itself looked like it was being consumed by some kind of animated black cotton candy. That's just how awful the smoke was. Rescuers couldn't see a thing through it, but four people were still trapped inside the center, so off they went. They found one man unconscious by the door and were able to save them, but by the time they found the other three it was too late. The thick smoke and high temperatures made it way too dangerous for emergency workers to enter the station or the tunnel. Five hundred men surrounded by a hundred vehicles and some of the most advanced rescue equipment to be found on the continent, and there was nothing they could do, and the fire continued to burn for several hours. At some point the cable holding the train did actually melt through, but it didn't crash. What was left of the brakes held the train in place, or it was welded to the tracks. Thankfully, if it had let go, eighty thousand pounds of flaming metal, traveling at what I calculate to be over two hundred kilometers or one hundred and twenty five miles per hour, would have arrived at the lower station like a missile. After three hours, rescuers decided they had to risk it and tried entering the tunnel to search for potential survivors. Two teams of specially decked out personnel entered from the top and descended. On the way down, they first encountered the reverse train that had been making its way down the mountain at the time. The power had gone out, and thankfully there were only two people on board, but sadly both had been killed by the smoke Further down the tunnel. As they continued towards the ascending train, the track and rails had become twisted and abused by the heat of the inferno. Was clear this was not going to be a rescue. Around this time, the press outside were having a field day coming up with their own explanations for what went wrong, mostly related to fireworks and arson, but they were basing that on nothing but guesses, and one of the firefighters revealed that he had been offered five million dollars to smuggle in a camera and take some picks of the train and the victims before they were moved, but he didn't take it. What the rescuers discovered were all remaining one hundred and forty nine passengers, mostly still trapped inside the train, and no one survived. Over sixty dead bodies were found in the tunnel, and of those that made it out, most people fell within fifteen meters or fifty feet of the train before they were overcome and suffocated the furthest of anyone they discovered made it one hundred and forty two meters or four hundred sixty five feet before they collapsed. In all, over fifteen hundred people were involved in the rescue and recovery. Seven hundred and seventy one firefighters, three hundred and forty six members of the Red Cross, two hundred and seventy police officers, one hundred and fifty Austrian soldiers and twelve Mountain Rescue members, and not just that. The list goes on and on, but I wanted to point out that forty five psychologists and five coroners also took part. Twelve people managed to survive, one hundred and fifty five died. So what happened? Well? To figure that out, investigators needed to piece together how a vehicle that was lifted by an external winch and didn't have a complicated electrical system and didn't contain any fuel was able to become actively ablaze in less than four minutes and completely incinerated itself down to a metal skeleton in less than half an hour. To do this, they couldn't move the vehicle itself without damaging potential evidence, but they were able to recover her sister train. For investigators, it was a little like being able to autopsy your twin to see what happened to you. One of the survivors, Thomas Krause, was brought to the rescued train to point out exactly where he first saw the smoke. He said, it looked like it came from the rear attendant's cabin, and the smoke had been coming from the control panel. Their investigation had ruled out foul play and any obvious sign of faulty wiring. No one had entered the cabin that day, and the wiring had been coated in a self extinguishing material that couldn't sustain a flame. There was nothing to explain what happened. Then they found it. It could easily hit twenty below in the depth of winter here, and it is a bit of a human rights abuse to force the attendants to freeze to death. So when the train was updated, they threw a space heater into the cabins at the front and back. The heaters were basic off the shelf, consumer style space heaters, the kind of thing you might put in a bathroom, and they were installed to give the attendant some degree of comfort. Un intended, they'd been fitted beneath the control panel where the smoke was first spotted, and when I say fitted, I really mean broken. They'd been kind of roughly cajoled into place, which did some damage to the housing where now plastic was able to come in contact with the heating element. So that's pretty bad. But then investigators discovered an oily liquid on the track above the valley leading to the tunnel entrance, and it turns out. It was hydraulic fluid, the stuff that powered the brakes and the door systems. The hydraulic system had been installed during the upgrade, and it held about one hundred and sixty liters or more than forty gallons of hydraulic fluid, and there was a hydraulic pressure gage on the control panel and small little pipes that carried oil under pressure into the gauge for it to read. The thing is hydraulic pipes and the term leak proof don't always go together. And those pipes happened to run immediately beside the broken heater. A dribble of oil had run down the pipes into the faulty heater, which came on automatically when the train had been idling at the station. The heating element ignited the oil, which went unnoticed until after the train had already left the station. As the flames melted the leaky pipes, oil gushed out at high pressure like a flame thrower, soaking the floor and dripping onto the tracks below. As the pressure dropped below eighty percent, a failsafe locked up the brakes, trapping them in the tarp funnel. With about one hundred and twenty eight liters or more than thirty two gallons left to feed the blaze, which ultimately melted the train itself. On any other day, the failsafe would have been a blessing to have, but today it kept them from reaching potential safety while also being unable to open the doors and escape the roaring blaze. And it is worth noting that this kind of hydraulic fluid was surprisingly flammable. The train ran on mobile arrow HFA hydraulic oil, which quite clearly has keep away from heat and flame right on the bottle. It's called a napthenic oil. They used to use it in the aviation industry, but like I said, flammable, so it was banned pretty quickly. But it was used in the funicular because it worked really well at terrible temperatures. And then there was the matter of the tunnel itself. Most people picture fire something like this. Flames, burn, heat rises, you step back, and that's fine if your train is burning in a free and open space, which hours was not. In an open air fire, heat rises and disperses, and then oxygen flows in from every which way and the smoke just carries away on the breeze. You have no chance of being suffocated by it, and it is quite easy to play keep away from the flames. Kittsteinhorn had a steep fire low in a horizontal tunnel, and it is not obvious, but in a slanted tunnel fire would have behaved something more like a pressurized, self sustaining thermal engine or a tunnel shaped furnace, just sucking in the oxygen from below and vomiting out heat and smoke from the top. That fire would have reached as much as eight hundred two thousand degrees or fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred fair hue ight. And in open air, fire loses strength as it spreads, but in a tunnel like this, fire gained strength because the energy released has nowhere to go. They describe it as a natural convection accelerator. It's like the difference between a campfire and a blow torch. And just to help make things worse, the walls of the tunnel also absorb heat and then radiate it back on itself again with nowhere else to go. After a life and death struggle to pry the doors, those who were able spilled out of the train saw the fire raging from below started to flee upwards and were asphyxiated by the smoke, and then they were either burned by the raging fire or simply charred by the heat. DNA tests were carried out on the remains of victims burned beyond recognition. Many of the passengers were found still seated or collapsed close together. Some bodies had been reduced almost to ash. Most victims died from inhalation of carbon monoxide, burning plastics, burning rubber, burning PVC and synthetic seating and wall panels and all of it. But wait, there's more. The polyester in nylon and acrylic fabrics from all of the skiwar and gloves and backpacks, and even the burning plastic of ski boots and helmets all added to the mix. PVC and plastics release hydrogen chloride, and just so you know, you don't want anything with chloride in the name in your lungs. It's painful and it can lead to bronchospasm or pulmonary edema. Plastics and textiles can release hydrogen cyanide, and just so you know, you don't want anything with cyanide in the name in your lungs. They call these irritant gases and partially because once they're in you, they actually make the heat feel sharper and more suffocating. Being trapped in ski clothing will make you overheat faster, which makes your panic sharper, which makes you breathe faster, which then ingests more poison and speeds up you're checking out time. Carbon monoxide alone, just one among dozens or hundreds of toxic elements floating around, binds to your blood cells two hundred and forty times easier than oxygen, which that to not make you so good think, followed by unconsciousness and eventually cardiac arrest. So you've gone on a ski vacation to relax and get some exercise, but instead you're trying to headbut your way through bulletproof glass while receiving an unrequested chemistry lesson in the combustion of toxic materials, would you know what to do? I'm not going to be able to teach you how to identify and then provide instructional chemistry for creating countermeasures for the hundreds of different toxic byproducts from burning plastics or fuels or wiring or furnishings or vehicles or clothes or you name it. But I can walk you through some harm prevention and survival guidance. Smoke and combustion gases are typically more dangerous than flames. In fact, most fire fatalities result from the inhalation of gases, not burns. Your first priority is to reduce the amount of life shortening gases that you're inhaling. Many deadly gases like carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide are pretty odorless, so assume all smoke is toxic, regardless of the smell or color. Toxic regardless of the smell or color rule of thumb. If you can see it, it can kill you. Get as low as possible because heat drives toxins upward where they tend to concentrate. Oxygen levels drop everywhere in an enclosed space, but your best chance on sucking up what's left of it is always going to be lower to the ground. If you've been able to wrap some clothes around your mouth and nose, good for you. And you should know this is just a crude screen. It can't actually filter gases, but it can reduce your chances of choke inhaling on smoke particles and then sucking in more gas than you need and wetting them can give them better filtering properties. And I haven't had to say this in a while, but even urine will do the trick. But because you don't have an air tank and gases are coming for you no matter what you wear, take slow, shallow breaths. Panicky hyperventilating also increases your toxin intake. Only move if you know where you're going. It's better to avoid open, central spaces where keeping your direction is harder to maintain as you blindly stumble through smoke guessing where a door might be when moving, The best thing you can do is stay low and feel for a wall or carpet or railings or whatever you've got to help you stay oriented. You want to move quick, but you should really be more worried about moving deliberately. When you do find a door, you want to touch it briefly with the back of your hand to see if it's hot enough to talk you out of opening it. If you are trapped in a room, seal any gaps around doors and vents to prevent smoke or toxins from entering, and can serve your air no beatboxing. This is going to be one of those times where knowing your exits really covers your bacon. In a perfect world, you'd stay in contact with the wall with the exit and count doors until you've found the right one. Extreme heat causes injury quickly, but toxins act silently and even quicker, and you may feel okay while oxygen deprivation and poisoning are getting their fingers into you. But if you experience dizziness or headache or confusion or nausea, or just sudden fatigue or even a ringing in your ears, you are in a bad way. So get low, breathe slow, focus on finding clearer air, avoid movement unless necessary, block the smoke, and conserve oxygen while signaling for help and whatever you do. And I always say, don't panic, because you can't panic your way out of a situation. And all it's really good for is using up oxygen faster. Now that investigators had the who, what, when, and how of it, they just needed the why. Remember the heater unit they had been designed to sit under someone's desk, not to be hammered into an alpine train cabin, and they were never meant to be powered on permanently either, And since that's exactly what happened in doing so, they managed to disable a protection against overheating, and not just that the funicular had been registered as a cable railway sit instead of a train, which sounds like a small distinction, but it offered up a much simplified checklist of safety standards. They actually argued that without an engine on board, the train was something closer to an elevator. Didn't really matter what they called it, since safety wasn't really going to be enforced regardless. Over the years, there had been governmental cutbacks that meant that Austria's railways had been neglected. For some time. There were only eleven technicians responsible for overseeing the testing and safety of more than three thousand funicular railways and cable cars and ski lifts across the whole country. But someone must have been responsible, so enter the legal proceedings. Sixteen managers and technical staff from the company operating the funicular, the manufacturers, government inspectors, the Ministry of Transport, and people involved with the safety, certification or oversight of systems on the train and in the tunnel were charged with criminal negligence. So when did the executions begin, you ask, Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Prosecutors had to make the case that the disaster was sufficiently foreseeable in the legal sense, which they couldn't, and all sixteen defendants were acquitted. Negligence law requires a defendant to be able to reasonably foresee the outcome from their actions or inactions, and the families waited for long years to hear this, and they reacted appropriately, meaning loudly and poorly inside and outside the court. Corporate manslaughter laws allow courts to punish organizations, at least in other countries, just not this one. The families waited four long years just to hear this, and they reacted appropriately, meaning loudly and poorly in and outside the court. There were appeals but they were dismissed, and there were foreign lawsuits but they were dismissed, and the courts were all. Have a nice but deeply emotionally unsatisfying day. It's not that the law protected the negligent, which was what everyone argued, is exactly what it did. Now. The law simply was not designed to assign blame. And we've talked about rules written in blood before. In Austria, fire safety standards and evacuation requirements, especially in tunnels were completely rewritten. Fire resistant interiors on vehicles like this became mandatory and doors had to be openable in emergency, and not just in Austria, but across Europe. This disaster permanently changed how tunnel and ra aal safety was regulated for millions of people. Nothing in there about accountability though, and it is pretty short shrift and cold comfort for the victim's families, but that's law for you. The dead included whole families, many with young people and children. The vast majority of victims ninety two were Austrians, but thirty seven Germans, ten Japanese, eight Americans, four Slovenians, two Dutch, one Czech and one Britain were also killed. The survivors were two Austrians and ten Germans, and of the victims, thirty one were under eighteen years old. Among the dead was Sandra Schmidt, a nineteen year old German gold medal skier who'd won the Freestyle World Cup just the year before. Four hundred and fifty one survivors, families and next of kin split a four eighteen million dollar euro payout that's about seventeen million dollars US provided that they signed away any right they had to any kind of future lawsuit. And I can tell you, as someone who is in no position to turn away money in a situation like this, money is a piss poor replacement for justice, especially in light of the fact that no one ever received any kind of apology from well anyone involved. So I sighed deeply with the families. On the eleventh of May, one hundred and fifty five wooden crosses were lined up along the road leading to the Valley station, one for each of the victims. Three days later, a parent of one of the victims turned himself into police after running them all down with his car. He told them he just couldn't bear to be reminded of his pain every day. A memorial consisting of one hundred fifty five glass columns was unveiled close to the Valley station in two thousand four, and those he did not run over. As for the funicular, it was never repaired or recommissioned or reused. After the fire, I heard it described as irredeemable. The train cars were removed and dismantled, and the tunnel was permanently sealed and decommissioned. It was replaced with gondolas, and to this day, the world continues to enjoy the kitstein Horn ski area. Kitstein Horn survived, the funicular did not. The death toll stood at one hundred and fifty eight. One hundred and fifty five died in the tunnel, while poisonous fumes chimneying through the mountaintop station took three more, although it did try for four. The materials met to make the train modern and comfortable became lethal when heated, and the tunnel ensured that there was nowhere for the smoke to go but through the passengers. This disaster set a few unenviable milestones around tunnel and rail fire safety that remained to this day. The deadliest funicular accident ever recorded and the deadliest tunnel transport fire in European history, the Koprune funicular ski disaster of two thousand remains Austria's worst peacetime disaster and the deadliest rail fire not involving a crash or an explosion or an act of war in world history. There were no fire or smoke detection systems, no sprinklers, no fire extinguishers, no emergency lighting. There no evacuation walkway inside the tunnel, doors that only open from the outside, and no intercom or cameras to notify the conductor of danger. There were no cross passages or escape tunnels or windows because they were deep inside a solid mountain. Once inside, the passengers were fully committed. And just knowing that you're sealed inside a vehicle that you are never going to get out of again is to me maybe worse and more frightening than being eaten by a shark. It's slower, and you don't have a monster to focus your rage and fear on. All you've got are circumstances and a tortured feeling of helplessness that lasted an eternity. And also, I am not saying that I would rather be eaten by a shark. I guess my larger point is that the two options are terrifying, and I don't believe that anyone should ever have to choose between them. This was a hell of a story that for some will make them afraid of mountains, and others will be afraid of trains, and some will be afraid of skiing. I generally don't love episodes that create this kind of incredible helplessness that I described, But if you had to choose between dying on fire, or becoming sharp poo or supporting this show. I encourage you to choose life and become a cherished member of the cult. Over at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo if you haven't heard, it's where all the ad free episodes with all of the extra content live, including all the behind the scenes stuff and safety stuff and you name it. Donations from people like you are the reason that we've been able to do the show as long as we have, and the majority of supporters just sign up and make a small motherly donation which helps sustain the show that they love, and then, just like the Funicular, they disassemble and seal themselves inside a mountain of rock. At least I assume. I really don't know, because I value their privacy. And if you're worried that joining Patreon means that you have to become a cheerleader, it simply does not. I have no expectations of my followers, and I'm going to take a second to say to everyone who has ever supported me in the past, but for any number of reasons, has had to stop, thank you, Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate that you were there, and I hope you still love the show. There's zero hard feelings for the rest of you. You could always just visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday and show your support with a one time donation. I want to take a second for a quick but heartfelt shut out to Cindy Maynard go out, Jim Landrum lackshawna Sevenanda Ginger Jones, Michael de Simone, and Eric White. I want to thank you all and everyone for helping support the show on Patreon. Everyone is welcome to reach out to me on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or simply firing email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave a review and tell your friends. I always thank my listeners, new and old, for their support and encouragement, but I also asked that if you could spare the money and had to choose, for you to consider making a donation to Global Menic. Global Menic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot CAA. On the next episode, I always thought the scariest cheese in the world was probably head cheese, you know, the stuff made in the skulls of dead animals, or failing that, probably that Italian cheese that they make out of fly eggs. However, it turns out that the most frightening cheese in the world is a sweet and creamy Norwegian treat beloved by children. It's the Norwegian Cheese fire disaster of twenty thirteen. We'll talk soon safety gall goes off and thanks for listening.