Lisbon streetcar crash death toll rises to 17 as Portugal observes day of mourning
NBC News
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Source: NBC News
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LISBON, Portugal — A national day of mourning began in Portugal Thursday as the death toll rose to 17 after a popular funicular railway derailed in Lisbon.
At least 22 people were injured, in the capital’s worst accident in recent history.
Cordoned off by police, the crumpled wreckage of the yellow-and-white streetcar known as Elevador de Glória was still on the road early Thursday, lying on its side next to a building which it crashed into.
As a result parts of the mostly metal vehicle were crushed and its top and side were crumpled.
As investigators continued to work out what caused the accident, officials declined to speculate on whether a damaged brake or a snapped cable may have been at fault.
A team of homicide investigators were among those probing the crash, a spokesperson from the Polícia Judiciária, Portugal's judiciary police, told NBC News.
Teams of pathologists from the National Forensics Institute, assisted by colleagues from three other Portuguese cities, also worked through the night on autopsies, officials told the Associated Press. The injured were admitted to several hospitals in the Lisbon region.
After the government announced a national day of mourning Portugal’s President Marcelo canceled a trip to a book festival and said in a statement that he offered his “solidarity to the families affected from this great tragedy.”
Calling the accident “a tragedy of the like we’ve never seen,” Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas said the city was in mourning.
Classified as a national monument, the Elevador de Glória funicular connected Restauradores Square to the Jardim de São Pedro de Alcântara in the Bairro Alto neighborhood.
Inaugurated in 1885, the service goes up and down a few hundred yards of a hill on a curved, traffic-free road in tandem with one going the opposite way. A popular attraction with Lisbon's tourists, long lines of people typically form for the brief rides on the popular streetcar.
Harnessed by steel cables and can carry more than 40 people, seated and standing and it is also commonly used by Lisbon residents.
Among the injured were, two German and two Spanish nationals, as well as a Korean, Cape Verdian and a Russian, said Margarida Castro Martins, the head of Civil Protection Agency. A Canadian, and an Italian were also hurt in the crash, along with a Swiss national, she said.
Lisbon’s City Council halted operations of three other famous funicular streetcars in the city while immediate inspections were carried out.
Alexandre Rodrigues, the commander of the Lisbon fire brigade, Alexandre Rodrigues, told a group of journalists on Wednesday that they were alerted about the derailment at 6:01 p.m. local time (12:01 p.m. ET) and arrived within three minutes. The funicular derailed and crashed into a building, he said.
Emergency officials said all victims were pulled out of the wreckage in just over two hours.
Carris, the company that operates the streetcar, said in a statement on Wednesday that “all maintenance protocols were carried out and complied with” and that the last repairs were done in 2024.
But Manuel Leal, the head of the Federation of Transport and Communications Workers’ Unions (Fectrans) and the Union of Road and Urban Transport Workers of Portugal (STRUP) said Wednesday that Carris workers had made “repeated complaints” about the need for maintenance on the funicular carriages, according to the Portuguese state news agency Lusa.
“There must be an investigation into the root causes of this accident, not least because workers have been reporting for a long time that the maintenance of these carriages should be the responsibility of Carris workers and not outsourced to external companies, as is the case with the Glória lift,” he said.
Carolina Bastos Pereira reported from Lisbon and Babak Dehghanpisheh from New York.
Source:
NBC News
