Mottarone, engineer under investigation: “I’ll be back home, it’s impossible to forget”

The tragedy of the Mottarone cable car? “I will remember that Sunday day all my life. I feel bad at all, let alone how I am now knowing that fourteen people have died. This is a terrible tragedy. I will always keep it in my heart. It is impossible to forget it. And unfortunately I cannot help it. nothing”. To speak, in an interview with La Stampa, is Enrico Perocchio, technical director of the Mottarone cableway and employee of Leitner. The engineer, one of the suspects in the investigation into the Stresa-Mottarone cable car accident, is the person who was entrusted with the maintenance of the cable car. Last night, he left the Verbania prison: “It has been a very heavy six days – he explains -: this accusation is devastating. Now I am finally a little relieved. I am going back to my family”. Retracing the whole story, the engineer recounts the moment when he heard the news: “I was at home and left immediately for the place of the accident. I thought there was relief to be organized, no one had told me what had happened. When they explained it to me I felt like I was dying. “It’s not possible,” I thought. If I had known that brake blocks, the so-called forks, were being used, I would have stopped the system immediately. Finding out this now is a huge boulder on my stomach. ” . For each repair job or technical problem it was up to him to decide how and when to intervene, however he assures: “I didn’t know about the forks. If I had known I would not have endorsed that choice. I have been working in cableways for twenty-one years and I know that those are things to never do, for any reason in the world “. Then he underlines: “All the maintenance has been done. It was all right. Now we will see the analyzes on the breaking of the rope to understand the reasons”. On his relationship with Nerini, he says: “It’s a pretty good working relationship. I honestly believed that the management of the plant was more of the head of the service than his”. But “I don’t know how much he got into technical discussions. I had dialogues with him related to administrative and regularity issues of the plant. If there was a problem he asked that Leitner solve it for him and we always solved it. I never received from Nerini. pressures to turn in irregular conditions “. As to why, then, he may have made that choice, he says, “I’m not in his head, I can’t know. If I had known, I would have blocked him before.” In any case, the breaking of the rope, he warns, is a “very rare” event, but “it can happen”. So much so that “the presence of emergency brakes is foreseen”. So now “we will shed some light on how this could have happened, but I know with certainty that the maintenance on the ropes and cast head were in place here”. It is certain, he assures us, that “if my eye had fallen on the forks, colored red on my own initiative, which I wanted to be clearly visible, I would have had them removed immediately”. In short, “it was a mistake to put the forks to remedy a problem that could or could be solved. It was enough to close the business for one or two days, just block the cable car and the problem was solved”. After all, “this is a low season”.