Lebanon’s Civil Defense Directorate announced on Thursday that it had rescued 40 people who had been trapped inside cable car cabins in the city of Jounieh, Mount Lebanon Governorate, after seven hours of continuous work. The rescue was carried out in cooperation with the Lebanese Army’s Commando Regiment.
The Directorate said that its operations room received a report in the afternoon of a malfunction in the cable car that led to the collision of two empty cabins and the disruption of the movement of the other cabins, which contained a number of passengers of different ages, including many children and a pregnant woman.
The Directorate said that it deployed the automatic ladder from its central operations headquarters and immediately began rescue operations, which ended at 7pm on Thursday. It said that the rescue operations faced many obstacles, the most prominent of which was the difficulty of working in the mountainous area, as the cable car travels a distance of 1,570 meters from the coastal city of Jounieh to the mountainous area of Hareisa in the midst of forests of evergreen trees.
The Directorate said that two special winches were used to reach the stranded cabins in a high place, following a call from the head of the Jounieh Union of Municipalities, who inquired about the capabilities of the Civil Defense in this regard. Elements of the Civil Defense’s mountain rescue teams were also brought in and worked to rescue the passengers trapped inside the cable car cabins.
