Читать книгу 155 - Hubertus Godeysen - Страница 12

Maximilian Steiner, 27, is there with a group from Vilseck, Bavaria. He was one of the last passengers to get on the "Kitzsteingams." He’s standing in the lowest part of the train, next to the wall that separates his coach from the unoccupied attendant’s cab, which he can see right into through a small viewing window. His friends from Vilseck are gathered around him in a dense group. With 161 people and all their ski equipment inside, the train is so crowded that everyone is standing shoulder-to-shoulder. They can hardly move.

"Here we go," says someone as the train starts up. "In this weather," another passenger says, "it would actually have made more sense to take the cable car."

The train has advanced 30 meters when a man next to Steiner raises the alarm: "Look, there’s smoke coming out back there."

Steiner leans over and peers into the unoccupied valley-side cab beneath him. He’s not yet worried by what he sees. The light grey smoke issuing from the fittings is roughly the amount that would come from two or three cigarettes. "It’s not that bad," the two agree, "Let's just stay calm."

Steiner looks up and makes eye contact with the other members of his group, but he can’t get his mind off what’s happening in the attendant’s cab. What’s causing that smoke? In just a few seconds, it has increased significantly. At that point, the train is only halfway to the tunnel entrance, still out in the open. A man he doesn’t know on the other side of the carriage can see through another little window and shouts loudly enough for everyone to hear: "Calm down! Don’t panic, we need to remain calm." He rummages in his ski jacket, pulls out his phone, and tries to make a call. That must be a local, thinks Steiner. Can he stop the train? It takes ages for the man to put the phone to his ear. Meanwhile, the train has left the valley station so far behind that it looks like a miniature. The tunnel entrance above them is getting closer and closer, and before they know it, it’s swallowed the train.

"Dammit," swears the man into his collar, "no connection."

The train is enveloped in darkness. Under the light of the neon lamps in the ceiling of the train coach, people can make out the tunnel wall, which seems to be rushing past them at breakneck speed. Steiner finds it hard to stay calm. The people around him have already noticed the burning smell. They’re upset, looking around: "What is that? Something’s burning."

Steiner stares incredulously as the smoke fills the attendant’s cab. This could get serious, he thinks. The people above him can’t see the source of the smell and are arguing about it. "Stay calm!" shouts one, almost commanding them, "Calm down."

"We have to stop the train!" yells another.

Thirty meters further up, Siegfried Schwabl sits focused on the tracks and the tunnel wall, oblivious to what is going on behind him.

Meanwhile, the smoke has completely filled the cab and taken on a menacing black hue. Now, for the first time, Steiner notices fire in the cab. If he leans down, he can see blue flames leaping from the console. The smoke is so thick it’s starting to come through cracks in the wall into the skiers’ carriage. Insidiously, it sneaks in from below.

By now, everyone in the back part of the train has noticed. They’re beginning to scream, "There’s a fire!"

The little girl whose father set her on the rail sees the smoke in the attendant’s cab now, too, and shrieks "It’s burning!"

Most of the 161 passengers still have no idea what’s going on because they’re too far away from the fire or standing in a separate carriage, like the ski group from Japan or the five snowboarders from Vienna. The cries of "fire!" combine with voices urging calm. "Just wait, someone’s coming," says one person.

"They must have a fire extinguishing system," says another.

Then the train slows down, gradually, not abruptly. Only two minutes have passed since they left the valley station. It takes 25 seconds for the whole railway, this giant machine almost four kilometers long, to come to a standstill. The train full of people is stuck in the tunnel, 531 meters from the entrance.

Above Maximilian Steiner are four of his colleagues from the Vilseck ski club. Now that they’ve stopped on an open stretch of the tunnel, everyone wonders what the matter is. Someone says the train always stops in the middle, where a side tunnel leads into the open air. But there is no middle station to be seen here.

They’ve already noticed the burning smell, but it’s only now that they realize how serious their situation is. The flames in the cab are blazing, visible even to the passengers further up.

"Where the hell are the emergency hammers?" yells someone, "Does anyone see a fire extinguisher?"

The confined passengers begin to press upwards, jostling each other, away from the fire. Some of them yell, "Fire! Do something!" A local calls out, "There’s nothing here! No emergency hammers!"

Little children standing next to Maximilian Steiner start to cry. Someone keeps shouting, "Don’t panic! Remain calm! Remain calm!"

At the same time, someone else tries to get the doors open, first with his bare hands, then with a ski pole. No luck. The ski pole bends and breaks. The doors might as well be cemented shut. Steiner looks up to see if any doors have opened there. Nothing. They’re trapped. Only about a meter from the fire, but with no chance of fighting it, escaping or even sounding an alarm.

As the smoke advances, people at the upper end of the carriage start to have trouble breathing, too. They put their mouths and noses into their jackets. The smoke is extremely aggressive.

"Keep calm, it’s not a problem," says one man to his wife, who is increasingly frightened. Everyone looks around in a desperate search for emergency hammers or fire extinguishers, anything at all they could use to fight the fire or free themselves. They’re also hoping someone will come and open the doors—hoping in vain. Someone shouts, "We have to break the windows!"

A member of the Vilseck ski group, a hulk of a man, starts slamming a ski against a windowpane. At both ends of the carriage, others begin laying into the resistant acrylic glass.

The doors stay closed and the attendant’s cab is already half-filled with flames. The heat is so intense that Steiner can feel it through the wall. People are crowding towards the upper end of the coach, away from the fire. Steiner’s about a half meter from it now. As the smoke builds, the roar of the fire becomes a menacing background noise.

More than two kilometers further up at the mountain station, the operator sits in his control room, a gold-beige console before him. He has an overview of the whole system. This is also where the power that drives the funicular railway is located. A mechanical display on the left shows him the locations of the trains in the tunnel, visualized by two small metal plates with the labels "Drache 1" and "Gams 2." To the right of them, next to the microphone, the word "stop" is glowing for "Train 2 Gams," and not for "Train 1 Drache." It’s clear to the operator that the stop was triggered by the Kitzsteingams, but he doesn’t know why the railway’s giant yellow and black planetary gears have come to a standstill.

"Why did you stop the train?" he asks over the communication line that runs through the inside of the cable.

"I didn’t stop the train," says Schwabl from the tunnel, almost three kilometers away.

"Impossible. I got a 'stop' signal from you. Where’s the disturbance coming from?"

"I don’t know. I’m telling you, everything’s fine on my end: signals okay, carriage and door electricity supply okay, mains voltage okay, servo pressure okay."

The operator shakes his head.

Then Schwabl comes back on the line from the tunnel. His tone of voice has changed completely. "The train’s on fire!"

The operator can’t believe his ears. "Are you sure?"

"Yes! It’s blazing at the very back, I saw it from the emergency stairs. The train’s on fire!"

"Oh my God! If the train’s on fire, you have to get the doors open fast!"

It’s tough work breaking through the windowpanes, a struggle for mere survival. In twos and threes, the trapped people are trying with all their might to burst them open. They hit one about twenty times before the first little hole appears. And then, to their horror, they realize the windows have double panes. The passengers hurry to expand the first hole by hand so they can fiercely attack the second pane. It feels like an eternity before they finally open a hole.

The escape hole is small, but people squeeze through somehow, getting pushed, pressed, and pulled till they fall out of the train. Maximilian Steiner is the third one out. Before going through, he takes another look at the attendant’s cab and sees that the heat is already warping the viewing windows. And he sees flames leaping up to lick the edges of the windows in his carriage. He notices the carriage doors are still closed, too.

Steiner tumbles out of the train. He feels the heat in the tunnel, hears the raging fire. He sees that in the cars above him, other windows have been broken and people are forcing their way out. Someone from the Vilseck ski group shouts, "Run downhill! Downhill!"

Steiner recognizes the voice: it’s Hubert Schmid, a firefighter who belongs to the ski club. He knows that the tunnel will draw the smoke gases up like a chimney, and urges people to run in the direction of the fire. Fortunately, there’s little fire to be seen on the side where they fell out. On the other side, the attendant’s cab is already ablaze.

In the train, a woman loses consciousness until her husband shakes her awake.

"I have to get out of here," she whimpers, coming to. There are burn holes in her anorak. She squeezes through the lowest hole but her ski shoe gets stuck. A man who came out further up and is sliding downwards sees her hanging head-down and frees her. "Quick, we have to run down!" he shouts to her.

Somehow they stagger, stumble, and slide down, surrounded by wheels, rails, electric and wastewater lines, until finally they’re lying below the train and the fire.

At that point, there are twelve people hurrying down, away from the train. In the light of the fire, they see the galvanized stairs on the wall of the tunnel. They clamber up to run along them as best they can, frightened, hurt, and wearing heavy ski shoes. They turn around again only ten meters from the train. To the left, they can make out the contours of the train. To the right, all they can see is the fire, leaping at the tunnel ceiling and feeding on the constant stream of air coming through the tunnel.

A woman from the Vilseck ski group is the last one to reach the steps below the burning train. Ahead of her, the other eleven skiers are running, tumbling, downhill. Their goal is the tiny point of light at the end of the tunnel, more than 500 meters away. The attendant’s cab is now engulfed in flames, burning everything above it like the sulfur tip of a match. The woman feels the air being drawn into the tunnel, delivering massive amounts of oxygen to the fire. Nobody will get through that wall of flames, she thinks, but there are still so many people in the train.

Suddenly, sparks fly down from the train between the tracks and back up again, followed immediately by an explosion, a bang, a ball of fire. They hear people screaming—those who didn’t make it down.

They are afraid to turn around, too scared the train will hurtle into the valley, taking them all with it. They steady themselves on a steel cable next to the stairs and run down as fast as they can, towards the light. They hear the roar of the fire consuming the train. They fall, struggle to their feet, keep running. Step by step, in a panic, they continue down the unusually long stairs.

A moment later, they hear a second, much bigger explosion. A wave of pressure rushes through the tunnel. The fleeing people hold the steel cable and do their best to flatten themselves against the wall. "Run, run!" yells someone, "The train could come down!"

And indeed, moments later one of the heavy steel cables zips down, spraying sparks and banging loudly.

During those seconds, as the people who escaped are running towards the end of the tunnel, Schwabl finally opens the doors. The people in the train begin another attempt to flee, but the cab is already fully ablaze. When they rush out of the train, what they see— to the extent they can see anything in the turmoil and chaos—is a fireball. Instinctively, they flee upwards via the narrow emergency stairs or are swept upwards by the mass of people trying to escape. The students from Vienna manage to run 30 meters before succumbing to the smoke and poisonous gas. Part of the Japanese ski group also makes it to the emergency stairs and hurries upwards. Fourteen-year-old Tomohisa Saze from Fukushima makes it farthest from the train, 142 meters away. Then he dies, too.

The survivors reach the end of the tunnel. All are injured, some severely, by smoke inhalation, falling out of the train, and stumbling along the escape route. They’re breathless and exhausted, in no mood for rejoicing.

"Where are the others?" asks one man. He’s in particularly bad shape. He is having trouble breathing, thinks he might be having a heart attack.

"We have to go back into the tunnel," says a woman, and in their shock, almost everyone agrees. "There are still people in there!" She knows her brother and niece are up there.

Hope springs one last time as water runs out of the tunnel, lots of water. "Look," says one man, "They got the fire under control."

They try to encourage each other. "It’ll be okay."

"Yes, look, everything will be fine."

But the water is not from an extinguisher or a sprinkler system. It’s from the water pipes in the tunnel that couldn’t withstand the heat and burst.

When the first responders, an advance team of the Kaprun volunteer fire department, arrive at the tunnel entrance, they are met with blank incomprehension.

"You don’t need to treat us," yells one of the survivors, "Get the others out!"

"We will," says one of the firemen, "but first we have to take care of you, so you don’t fall down the slope here."

"Come on! We have to go in, get the others!"

"Slow down," answers the fireman, unpacking his first-aid kit, "You’re bleeding."

The twelve survivors allow themselves to be treated against their will. They can’t understand why the volunteers are helping them instead of saving the other people in the tunnel. They don’t realize there’s no one left to save.