“This meeting took place in a very calm atmosphere […] which is precisely the tone that is needed to assess a tragedy of this magnitude, far from electoral exploitation and partisanship. We need to remain calm. The tragedy is still something we need to understand. What happened should not have happened, but now we are going to commit ourselves to trying to understand what happened, and that commitment is total, in a now calmer context,” said the deputy mayor, Filipe Anacoreta Correia (CDS-PP).
The vice-president of Lisbon city council was speaking at the end of an extraordinary meeting to update information on the Glória funicular accident, held at the request of the opposition, which wanted it to take place on 25 September.
However, the mayor of the municipal executive, Carlos Moedas (PSD), decided to schedule it for Monday, the day after the local government elections, “so as not to politicise an issue that deserves full technical clarification”.
The derailment of the Glória elevator, managed by the municipal public transport company Carris, occurred on 3rd September and caused 16 deaths and two dozen injuries, among Portuguese and foreigners of various nationalities.
Advocating a stance of clarification and total transparency regarding the accident, PS councillor Pedro Anastácio criticised the PSD/CDS-PP leadership, as well as Carris, for “a stance of silence, of not disclosing information”, considering that “this is negative because it hinders the restoration of the city and the city’s confidence in Carris’ public transport infrastructure”.
Regarding the new data on the Glória funicular, including two accidents that occurred before the tragedy of 3 September but were not properly recorded by Carris, the deputy mayor assured that “no one wanted to take responsibility for them or make them public”, explaining that these episodes were due to human error and “have no parallel” with the scale of the accident on 3 September, “which raises structural issues regarding the safety of the lifts themselves”.
The mayor of the municipal executive, Carlos Moedas (PSD), decided to schedule it for Monday, the day after the local government elections, “so as not to politicise an issue that deserves full technical clarification”.
“Carris and the city council are fully committed to clarifying everything that is relevant and that will help us understand what happened. No one is on the defensive or concerned about covering up or not bringing the information to light, but in a very difficult management situation, which is a management situation resulting from an accident that has left us all very disturbed, there may eventually be communication failures,” explained Anacoreta Correia, reinforcing that the total commitment is to understand what happened “so that it does not happen again”.
For socialist Pedro Anastácio, the Lisbon city council’s duty “was to immediately put an end to this controversy” with “a full explanation of it”. “We regret that this was not the option chosen,” said the PS councillor.
As for the warnings about the lift’s operation, Pedro Anastácio said that the information conveyed was “generic in relation to maintenance, never specific to the Glória funicular”.
“Many aspects still need to be clarified, namely understanding what happened and what went wrong,” insisted the socialist, awaiting the final report on the accident to understand what went wrong, who was at fault and who is responsible.
PCP councillor Ana Jara said that “this meeting, in a way, had no effect”, indicating that “no full clarification was given” on the implementation of the communist proposal to assess the state of repair of the lifts, including the outsourcing of maintenance, as well as on the study of tourist load.
From Citizens for Lisbon (elected by the PS/Livre coalition), Paula Marques stressed that “there was no real clarification”, noting that several questions were not answered by PSD/CDS-PP, namely regarding Carris’ responsibility in monitoring the maintenance company.
Livre councillor Carlos Teixeira, replacing Rui Tavares, also expressed his dissatisfaction with the clarifications, particularly regarding “issues relating to the past, present and future of this whole situation”, highlighting the process of modernising the lifts.
Platform with Lusa
