An Austrian newspaper has claimed that there were, in fact, passengers on board a gondola when cabins collided with one another on a line during extreme wind conditions last Sunday.
The Hichzillertal ski area's lift company, said the gondola cabins were empty and returning to the station for storage when the incident occured, but one of the last passengers to have got off the lift before the accident has told the Tiroler Tageszeitung newspaper he believes there were people on board.
The anonymous source said he was on one of the last cabins to make it in to the station on the new lift and that the doors on the cabin were not working properly and had to be manhandled open.
He told the paper that as the cabins up the line collided with one another, probably due to one being derailed next to a lift tower, he saw skis falling from the door storage units as the cabins were knocked at extreme angles. He believes there must therefore have been people in the cabins.
Official government safety tests are currently underway to determine what happened. The Tiroler Tageszeitung reports that initial tests have ruled out operator error and technical error as a cause of the incident and found the lift shut down after the accident, which is being described locally as "the gondola salad" via an automated safety device.
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