page_title: 1999 Wuppertal Schwebebahn accident
section_title: Rescue efforts
hierarchical_section_title: 1999 Wuppertal Schwebebahn accident / Rescue efforts
context_page_description: The Wuppertal Schwebebahn accident took place on 12 April 1999 on a stretch of track near Robert-Daum-Platz station. In this accident involving car number 4 from the WSW GTW 72 series, five persons lost their lives while 47 were injured, some of them seriously. This was the worst accident in the railway's history and, to date, the only one since the railway opened in 1901 to have had a deadly outcome.
context_section_description: Employees from the firm ELBA, which stood alongside the river and the track, climbed over a scaffold in the river after hearing the loud bang and began the efforts to save the victims. The train's driver, who was himself injured, also helped to rescue the passengers. According to a resident who called the emergency services to report the accident, his report was at first met with laughter from the dispatcher on the telephone, as it was considered inconceivable for a Schwebebahn train to fall off the overhead track, and nobody had ever died in an accident on this railway, which was thus said to be the world's safest.
  In the end, more than 150 firefighting and ambulance personnel were on hand, along with twelve emergency physicians, to rescue and treat the injured at the site, which could only be reached with difficulty. Even clergymen were called into service to minister to those who were suffering from psychological shock.
  The injured were taken to two nearby buildings and a tent set up by the firefighters in an underpass. Further gathering points for the injured were set up at a factory and in a quickly built tent city at a carpark. Conference rooms on the ground floor at a bank became a field hospital. A nearby hospital, the Ferdinand-Sauerbruch-Klinikum (now called the Helios Universitätsklinikum Wuppertal), was the first to admit patients from the accident scene. Meanwhile, the city square Robert-Daum-Platz, where Bundesstraße 7 and Landesstraße 427 cross, became an emergency landing pad for three rescue helicopters. At the Städtisches Klinikum Barmen (another hospital, now also part of the Helios Universitätsklinikum Wuppertal), all routine operations were postponed and all available doctors were pressed into emergency service. Within three hours of the accident, all 47 of the injured, suffering from broken bones, bruises and lacerations, found themselves at hospitals in Wuppertal, Remscheid and Solingen. Two men were recovered from the wreck dead, while a woman's body was only recovered hours later after the river had borne it downstream from the accident site. Two other passengers later succumbed to their injuries.
caption: The accident site in 2005; the steam pipe bridge can be seen in the background.
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