Nine die when helicopter drops block on cable car

VIENNA - Nine people were killed when a helicopter dropped a concrete block on a cable carrying a string of gondolas in an Austrian ski resort, police said on Monday.

The helicopter was carrying material to a mountaintop construction site when it dropped the block, knocking one car off its wires and leaving others swinging so violently that their passengers were thrown out.

Austrian radio said the victims, all Germans, were mainly young people travelling to the glacier ski area above the popular Alpine resort of Soelden in the western Austrian state of Tyrol.

"I can confirm that they are German," a spokesman for police in Tyrol said. The injured were also believed to be German, he added.

A spokeswoman for the Austrian Red Cross said up to 10 people had been seriously injured in the incident. Police put the figure at seven.

Television pictures showed bodies lying on the rock beneath the glacier. More than 100 other passengers had to be rescued from stranded cars.

"Everything happened very quickly and now we have nine people dead," Ernst Schoepf, mayor of Soelden, told Austrian ORF television.

"The block dropped on the cable, set it swinging, causing one car to fall and the others to swing around."

Soelden, close to the city of Innsbruck, is a popular ski resort both in winter and in summer, when hikers, skiers and snowboarders take cable cars up to glaciers above the village.

The lift carried passengers between Rettenbach and Tiefenbachferner, two stations in the sprawling ski area.

Austrian press agency APA reported that the helicopter was flying the piece of concrete, weighing around 750kg , around 300m above the car's cables when the block fell.

Austria has around 3000 cable cars and ski lifts, transporting around 500 million people a year.

Almost five years ago, 155 people were killed when a funicular ski train caught fire in a tunnel near Kaprun, 60 miles south of Salzburg in Austria's worst peacetime disaster.

- REUTERS