All seven students and one teacher stranded in a cable car dangling over a ravine have been rescued.
Cable Snapped – Travelers Stuck In Air
Pakistan’s military has rescued eight people — six children and two adults — who spent hours stuck in agonizing danger in a cable car suspended at least 900 feet in the air, after a cable snapped above a remote mountainous area in the north of the country.
The group had been stuck since 7 a.m. local time Tuesday after a cable line snapped, leaving the cable car dangling by a single cable, Shariq Riaz Khattak, a rescue official at the site, told Reuters.
They were traveling to school in a remote mountainous area in Battagram, about 125 miles north of Islamabad, when the cable car became stranded halfway across the ravine.
The first helicopter rescue took four attempts, said Bilal Faizi, spokesman for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region’s 1122 rescue service.
A second child was then rescued by the same method, the National Disaster Management Authority said in a statement.
“Everyone was praying for this moment,” Nazir Ahmed, a senior police officer, said.
Later in the evening, Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, the country’s caretaker prime minister, announced that all children aboard had been rescued. He thanked the military and local rescue workers for their efforts.
The rescue mission had been complicated due to gusty winds in the area and the fact the helicopters’ rotor blades risked further destabilizing the lift, Khattak had said.
Villagers often use cable cars to get to places around Pakistan’s mountainous regions, including schools, government offices and businesses. Every year people are killed or are injured while traveling on cable cars because they are often poorly maintained.
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