Mottarone, former employee: “I reported problems in cabin 3, threatened with dismissal”

Cabin 3 of the Mottarone cable car, which crashed last May 14 with 15 people on board and whose crash only the little Eitan survived, already in 2019 had problems with the braking system. This was revealed by a former employee who, heard by the Verbania prosecutor’s office last June, delivered audio recordings – stored on the mobile phone – which refer to May 27, 2019. “In the recordings – the minutes read – there are discussions with the deputy head of service Silvio Rizzolo who told me he had already reported to Gabriele Tadini (head of the cable car service under house arrest) and Luigi Nerini (the manager of the plant under investigation). The fault, according to the former employee, is that of having encountered problems in cabin 3 in 2019, “specifically on the control panel the minimum pressure of the non-return valve came out” also found “various leaks (leaks) of oil from the control unit of the emergency brakes “. Precisely to ‘solve’ the brake problems on the morning of the accident, cabin 3 was traveling with the forks inserted, thus the cabin without the emergency brake crashed when the towing cable broke due to causes under investigation. Also delivered a photo of cabin 3, “with Tadini (Gabriele, the head of the cableway system, ed) and forks inserted (year 2019)” photos and videos of the test ride inside the cabin and “photo documentation of the control unit braking system (May 27, 2019) “, system under the lens of experts. Stefano Carlo Gandini, hired in December 2017 and working in the plant until 2019, had as “direct superior Gabriele Tadini”, one of the suspects. In particular, the man tells how on May 28, 2017 together with the head of service Gabriele Tadini (under house arrest after the accident) they checked cabin 3. “The same – we read in the report of the former employee – he told me that everything was fine, to feel comfortable ‘the cable car doesn’t fall down’, and furthermore he reassured me that he would write everything down in the car book, creating it from scratch, which has never been done “. The road books “are obligatory in my way but have never been created. Similarly, nothing has been recorded in the control register”. On the ‘discrepancies’ found on the cabin the day before, the former employee made a note “signed by me and delivered to Luigi Nerini (plant manager, under investigation) for subsequent forwarding also to the engineer Perocchio (Enrico, under investigation). I know what happened to this document, I have never heard of it “, says the former employee who at the same time also received a letter of pre-dismissal.