Tragedies and disasters happen somewhere on the planet every day. A plane crash, a train collision, an avalanche, a bombing: These are the routine stuff of headlines, so predictable an element of the news that, unless they happen in one's own back yard, like the Kobe earthquake or the 1996 Hokkaido tunnel disaster, one becomes almost inured to them, incapable of shock.
Occasionally, though, something occurs in a far-off place that is so unexpected and inexplicable that it really jolts us. That happened last weekend, when a cable car caught fire in an Austrian mountain tunnel, sparking an inferno that killed at least 159 people, many of them children and teenagers. Since the victims included a number of Japanese citizens, the feeling of appalled sadness here was naturally intensified. But the truth is, this was already an unusually disturbing disaster. When a cable-car expert from Austria's Transport Ministry said on Sunday that the accident had "shocked us to our bones," he was speaking for more people than he knew.
Nobody knows why this happened. Funicular trains are considered one of the safest means of transportation in existence. They have no engines, since the cables that pull them up steep inclines are powered by engines at the top. They carry no fuel or other fluids. And like the Mount Kitzsteinhorn train, which passed inspection as recently as September, most are supposedly made of fireproof materials. It turns out that there were not even any fire extinguishers in the doomed train's passenger compartment, since a fire, according to another Transport Ministry official, was considered "practically impossible."