Bavarian builder hero to lucky few survivors

KAPRUN - The survivors of of the Austrian tunnel inferno owe their lives to a German builder from Bavaria called Erwin who persuaded them that their only possible escape route lay in the direction of the flames.

This emerged yesterday from an account by one of the 12 passengers who fought their way out of Kaprun's blazing funicular train. More than 160 people are feared to have died in the country's worst ever accident.

Gerhard Hanetseder, a 39-year-old Austrian, described the panic gripping the last carriage as choking passengers, with no access to fire-extinguishers and unable to contact the driver at the front, battled for their lives.

"We entered the tunnel and I said 'there is a small fire'," Hanetseder said. "After a bit, when we were in the tunnel, the train stopped automatically. Then the smoke came and panic started.

"We tried desperately to open the doors but we couldn't. There was more and more panic because the whole cabin behind us had started burning.

"By chance some of the passengers smashed a side window with a ski shoe or a ski. At what seemed like the last minute I saw a way out. I tried to take my daughter but she didn't quite make it through. So I gave her a little push and she fell down into the tunnel. I followed."

Instinctively, the passengers turned to run up the stairs, away from the flames lapping the empty driver's cabin at the end of the train. Erwin had different ideas. "We must go down," he shouted in the confusion. "Trust me."

Those that did are still alive. "I have a fire-place at home," the quick-thinking builder explained afterwards. "When you open the vents, the flames go up automatically. I knew that if we wanted to live, we had to go down."

They linked hands in the dark and fled, as quickly as their ski-boots allowed, Hanetseder clutching his 12-year-old daughter. Erwin tripped over a rail; in the struggle to get up he took in a lungful of deadly carbon monoxide. But the human chain held, Erwin was dragged along. The journey back to the living lasted 10 minutes.

Those who tried to follow this group, and the majority seeking their escape above, all perished.

As Austrian police gradually piece together the victims' identities, the country is suddenly made aware of unimaginable family tragedies. The youngest victim is believed to be 5-year-old Maximilian Klapper from the nearby community of Maria Alm. Maximilian's mother did not want to go skiing on on Sunday. She lives, while her husband Martin, Maximilian and his 15-year-old brother are in all probability dead. An entire American family perished. Major Michael Goodridge, aged 36, from Texas, stationed with the United States Army at Wuerzburg, Germany, who made a ski outing over the long Veteran's Day weekend died with his wife Jennifer, 35, and sons Kyle, 5, and Michael, 7.

Austria closed funicular railway trains similar to the one in Kaprun yesterday, while France and Germany ordered urgent safety checks on their own.

As the Austrian police launched an investigation into possible negligence, the first victims of the blaze were flown to the nearby regional capital of Salzburg for identification.

Rescue workers were confronting appalling conditions in the tunnel of the Kitzsteinhorn. Water is seeping in, the walls are covered in soot and exuding toxic fumes. Weakened and deformed by the inferno, the rock is crumbling away, with large chunks dropping from the roof. Firefighters and specially trained police have to walk 700m down from the station on the summit to carry out their grisly task of gathering the remains.

Engineers have fitted a winch but the rescue effort is still proceeding very slowly. "The fire was so intense that the surroundings melted," explained Major Franz Lang, the policeman leading the recovery.

"We have to cut out, dissect, each victim. It has to be possible for pathologists to reconstruct what happened, and this will take some time."

Even the experienced mountaineers in his team needed 15 minutes to walk down the 2000 steps along the rails, and another 40 minutes to return.

Police have established with "90 per cent certainty" that 159 people probably died in the tunnel.

While the bodies are being recovered, the technical experts who want to impound the wreckage must wait. The cause of the fire has yet to be established.

- INDEPENDENT