Portugal yesterday observed a national day of mourning a day after a Lisbon streetcar derailed and killed 16 people in the capital’s worst crash in recent history.
Authorities had given no information about those killed or the 22 who police said were injured in the incident, raising the initial casualty toll.
The 19th-century streetcar is one of Lisbon’s big tourist attractions and is usually packed with foreigners at this time of year for its short and picturesque trip up and down one of the city’s steep hills.
Photo: EPA
Teams of pathologists at the Portuguese National Forensics Institute, reinforced by colleagues from three other Portuguese cities, worked through the night on autopsies, officials said.
The injured people were admitted to several hospitals in the Lisbon region.
The streetcar’s crumpled wreckage yesterday was still on the downtown road where it crashed, cordoned off by police.
Officials declined to speculate on whether a faulty brake or a snapped cable might have caused the crash.
The yellow-and-white streetcar, known as Elevador da Gloria, was lying on its side on the narrow road that it travels on, its sides and top crumpled. It crashed into a building where the road bends, leaving parts of the mostly metal vehicle crushed.
“It hit the building with brutal force and fell apart like a cardboard box,” resident Teresa d’Avo told Portuguese TV channel SIC.
She described the streetcar as out of control and seeming to have no brakes, and said she watched passersby run into the middle of the nearby Avenida da Liberdade, or Freedom Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare.
The incident occurred at the start of the evening rush hour, at about 6pm.
Emergency officials said that all of the people inside were pulled out of the wreckage in just over two hours.
The streetcar, technically called a funicular, is harnessed by steel cables and can carry more than 40 people, seated and standing. It is also commonly used by Lisbon residents.
The service, inaugurated in 1885, goes up and down a few hundred meters of a hill on a curved, traffic-free road in tandem with one going the opposite way.
The Lisbon City Council halted operations of three other funicular streetcars in the city while immediate inspections were carried out.
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