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Sunday's Vatra Dornei chairlift incident that left 51 people stuck mid-air for several hours, requiring the intervention of firefighters and mountain rescuers to help them down to safety was caused by a reckless off-road driver who entered a forbidden area and hit a chair rolling at low altitude, the manager of the SC Vatra Dornei Chairlift company Paul Bonches said on Monday.
"The chairlift stopped on Sunday, April 24, at around 3:20 p.m., and as we attempted to restart it, we noticed that there was NO blockage, which meant that something more serious was going on. Soon after that I received a phone call from an individual named Sergiu Rusu, who told me that he had done something greatly foolish: he had slammed with his personal off-road vehicle into a lift chair, in the intermediate zone where it runs at a low height off the ground. That area is private property marked with no trespassing signs, which means that this is an exclusively individual guilt! After the chairlift technical team found that repair would require several hours of work, we had to follow the due procedures," the representative of the SC Vatra Dornei Chairlift company said in a Facebook message posted on Monday on the page of the Vatra Dornei Mountain Rescue Service.
He mentions that the tourists stuck in the chairlift witnessed the moment when the off-road vehicle hit the installation.
"We regret the incident, which came shortly after a previous one, but in both cases the issue was not the quality of the installation or neglect of maintenance, so that we call for more collective responsibility and thank our colleagues from the Emergency Inspectorate, the Mountain Gendarmerie, the Suceava and the Vatra Dornei Mountain Rescue Service for their fast response. We hope these are the last incidents of this kind and we apologize to all the tourists who experienced this unpleasant situation," the chairlift company manager said.
51 tourists, including a child, were left stranded on Sunday afternoon in the Vatra Dornei chairlift and were then lowered to safety by intervention crews. Military firefighters, mountain rescuers with specific equipment, and gendarmes from the Vatra Dornei and Campulung Moldovenesc intervened on site.
