It’s the stuff of nightmares. A reader in Georgia just alerted us to this terrible chairlift malfunction in the resort of Gudari, in the Caucusus mountains, where a lift began to run backwards at double speed, hurling people off at the station and causing carnage as successive chairs smashed into each other at the bottom.
As the chairs hurtled backwards, seemingly in a horriffic reverse timelapse such is the unnatural speed they’re moving at, one chair becomes detached from the cable and traps the occupants on the ground, before another whips round sending all four passengers flying.
Subsequent lifts piled into one and other, forming a mass of entangled metal, and at least one other unfortunate passenger was sickeningly ejected, but at this point it seems most of the people on the way down had decided to bail out to relative safety just before the station.
“While this is, of course, terrible, after watching the footage we can’t help but be amazed that more people weren’t hurt”
“There are many people from European countries, I don’t know from where and don’t know who was injured,” said the reader at first, before updating: “Two girls, from Ukraine and from Sweden, are in hospital with very hard injures.”
Georgian media would seem to confirm this, reporting that eight people had received minor injuries but two were seriously hurt. While this is, of course, terrible, after watching the footage we can’t help but be amazed that more people weren’t hurt.
The cause of the accident remains unclear, as is why the staff seemed powerless to stop the lift when it started running backwards. If anyone else was there who can offer more insight into the condition of the injured, what happened and why this went down please hit us up via our Facebook page because, firstly, we’d like to be able to report that everyone affected will recover from the ordeal, and furthermore – as we’re all regular users of chairlifts around the world – we’d really like to be able to discover what went wrong and that precautions are being put in place to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.
