9 rescued from dangling cable car
A family of nine was trapped inside three cable cars dangling over a bustling city in Mexico for four hours before they were lowered to safety, media reports say.
The counterweight cable snapped at about 5 p.m. on Tuesday in Taxco, leaving three children and six adults suspended 30 metres in the air. No one was injured but three people were taken to hospital to be treated for panic, reported Mexico News Daily.
The passengers were brought down to safety by a team of a dozen emergency responders who created a makeshift zip-line from a nearby building.
Footage of the harrowing rescue shows a first responder harnessed to a pulley and moving upside down along the main cable while a halted carriage dangles several metres away. The rescuer reaches the roof of the cabin and stands on top. He's then seen fastening a system of ropes to a beam holding the cable car. A stranded passenger is eventually attached to the zip-line and makes their way down to the nearby building as rescuers reach out to grab them. Onlookers are heard cheering.
In a subsequent report, Marco Cesar Mayares Salvador, head of the Guerrero Civil Protection agency, said the main steel cable was in no danger of failing and the passengers enduring the wait were, in fact, safe the whole time.
The cable car's operation has been suspended while a maintenance review is underway to replace any mechanical parts in poor condition, noted Mexico News.
The system is used by hundreds of people a day, who ride to and from the five-star Montetaxco Hotel, located on a giant hill, and the city centre below.
In May, a fatal cable car crash in the North Italian mountainside killed 14 people after the main cable snapped. The lone survivor of the tragedy, a five-year-old boy named Eitan Biran of Israel, lost his parents, little brother and great-grandparents. Three people have been arrested for suspicion of causing the crash, including the owner of the cable car company, for placing a clamp to disable the emergency brake as a solution for malfunctioning cables.