A man has died and his wife is critically injured after they plunged 250ft down a mountain when they took a wrong turn while riding a toboggan in the Austrian Alps.
The couple were sledding down the Rabantalm mountnain in East Tyrol on New Year’s Day alongside their daughter and her partner when they suddenly veered off the edge of the vertical slope after turning a corner.
The husband, a 63-year-old Austrian man, died instantly while his wife, 58, suffered severe injuries.
Sledders climbing up the mountain called emergency services after noticing the fresh toboggan run extending beyond the edge of the slope and hearing screams from below.
The wife was first airlifted to the Lienz District Hospital but was later transferred to the Klagenfurt Regional Hospital due to the severity of her injuries, while her husband’s body was recovered by the Lienz Mountain Rescue team.
The couple’s relatives were cared for by a crisis intervention team at the site of the accident.
The tragedy is the latest to hit the Alpine region after a fire in a bar at a Swiss ski resort left nearly 50 dead and another 115 injured during a New Year’s celebration.
Most injuries, many of them serious, occurred when the blaze swept through the crowded bar less than two hours after midnight Thursday in southwestern Switzerland.
The Crans-Montana resort is best known as an international ski and golf venue.
Overnight, its crowded Le Constellation bar morphed from a scene of revelry into the site of one of Switzerland’s worst tragedies.
While officials said Thursday it was too early to determine the fire’s cause, investigators have already ruled out the possibility of an attack.
The blaze broke out around 1:30 a.m. Thursday during a holiday celebration inside the Le Constellation bar.
Two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside when they saw a male bartender lifting a female bartender on his shoulders as she held a lit candle in a bottle.
The flames spread, collapsing the wooden ceiling, they told the broadcaster.
People frantically tried to escape from the basement nightclub up a narrow flight of stairs and through a narrow door, causing a crowd surge, one of the women said.
A young man at the scene said people smashed windows to escape the fire, some gravely injured, reported BFMTV.
He said he saw about 20 people scrambling to get out of the smoke and flames.
Gianni Campolo, a Swiss 19-year-old who was in Crans-Montana on holiday, rushed to the bar to help first responders after receiving a call from a friend who escaped the inferno.
‘As we get closer, we see almost dismembered persons lying on the floor, in cardiac arrest. People were also inside trapped, laying on the ground. We saw their clothes melting onto their skin,’ Campolo told TF1.
‘I have seen horror and I don’t know what else would be worse than this.’
