Mottarone cable car, Tadini: “Expected over a month for repairs”

The maintenance contract for the Mottarone cable car is at the center of the investigation by the Verbania prosecutor who is trying to understand the causes of the accident in which 14 people lost their lives. The delays in repairs, reported to Adnkronos by the head of service Gabriele Tadini, could have a weight. The facts, at the moment, are that it is the breaking of the hauling rope that triggers the tragedy, with the cabin falling for about 100 meters due to the emergency braking system block. A stratagem – that of leaving the fork inserted – which, confesses Tadini currently under house arrest, is used several times – about ten last May – to resolve those noises perhaps due to a loss of pressure in the braking system of the cabin that maintenance, twice, he fails to unravel. Intervention requests are made, “by phone, not via chat or email”, by Tadini to the operating manager, engineer Enrico Perocchio, consultant of the cable car and hired by Leitner, a company from Vipiteno which in the two-year period 2014-2016 deals with the restructuring of the system and which subcontracts the interventions on the brake system control units to Rvs, a specialized company in Turin. The manager of the plant, Luigi Nerini, pays 127 thousand euros a year for maintenance, a fixed contract that does not vary according to the number of interventions requested, interventions that must be carried out in certain and not extended times, generally within a few hours of the call. . Yet to hear Tadini times are not so fast. “The first intervention on the braking system took place last February 5 – his lawyer Marcello Perillo, who yesterday met his client for three hours yesterday, tells Adnkronos – but after about twenty days there is a second call for the same problem and yet maintenance only takes place on April 30th, as can be seen from the documents. As for the third maintenance request for the braking system made in Perocchio the first week of May, it is not so clear if it was scheduled, what is certain is that until the 23rd May, the day of the disaster, the intervention does not occur “. It will therefore be necessary to establish whether any delays in the interventions may have had a weight in this tragedy in which Tadini, in addition to assuming his responsibilities, calls into question the suspects Perocchio and Nerini who – according to him – knew about the use of forks to prevent the cabin stopped during the ride. “For me it was more likely that a chasm in the street would swallow me than that the rope verified on November 20 would break”, are the words of Tadini to his lawyer.