Ski girl missed fatal crash into hut wall by inches, say rescuers
A NINE- year- old British girl left seriously hurt after veering from a ski slope and smashing through a hut window was just inches from death, rescuers revealed.
India Furness was still unconscious last night after losing control and crashing through a safety net and fence before hurtling through the glass.
She is in the paediatric intensive care unit of the Innsbruck University Hospital, Austria, where doctors say she has severe injuries but her life is no longer in danger and she should recover.
The medic who treated her at the scene revealed that India, from Cerne Abbas, Dorset, would have been killed if she had hit the wall of the wooden hut instead of the first-floor window.
Gerhard Eder, of the rescue helicopter crew, said: ‘There was some luck in her misfortune because she came through the window rather than the wall.’
India, a pupil at Dorchester Middle School, had been travelling at about 30mph but was wearing a helmet.
Local police are investigating Monday’s accident on Austria’s highest mountain, the Grossglockner.
India’s parents Nigel, 50, a landscape gardener and Helen, 45, a caterer, had lost sight of their daughter when she lost control where the black run meets an easier red run, during a holiday in Goldried resort, near Innsbruck.
Austrian police said there is no lower age limit for children skiing on the most difficult black runs, saying it depends on the ability of the skier. Resort officials described the family as competent skiers but said that icy conditions had been a factor.
Speaking from her home in Dorset, India’s grandmother Phyllis Stenhouse said that the family had gone well prepared.
She added: ‘She lost control and she went through the safety net and through the barriers and through the window of the hut at the bottom.
‘The fact she went through the window must have saved her.’