Cable Car

A lawyer practicing in Söke, Memiş Enes Gümüş,along with his teacher wife and two sons, came to Antalya during the Eid al-Fitr holiday to both visit relatives and enjoy the break.

To view Antalya, a global center of attraction, from the Bey Mountains, they set out to ride the Tünektepe Cable Car located in Konyaaltı Sarısu.

With its 36 cabins and a capacity to carry 1,200 people, the cable car offers visitors the pleasure of watching the Gulf of Antalya from thousands of meters above, taking them from the harbor to the peak of the Taurus Mountains in just 9 minutes within a magical atmosphere.

When I rode the cable car last year with my two nephews, aged 12 and 7, I both experienced the enchanting beauty of nature and felt the timid anxiety of being in a cable car while suspended from a thin wire over a precipice.

Perhaps 54-year-old Memiş Enes Gümüş felt the same unease when he boarded the Tünektepe cable car with his two sons, Fatih (14) and Lütfullah (17), and his wife, Kezban Gümüş. Around 5:30 PM, with a deafening noise, the fifth pylon on the cable car line snapped. The cabin swung and struck the pylon. The bottom section of the cabin carrying the Gümüş family broke off. The 8 people inside the heavily damaged cabin fell from a height of several meters onto the rocks below. Father Memiş Gümüş lost his life. His children and wife were taken to the hospital with injuries.

The 605-meter-high cable car, which was brought to life during Menderes Türel's term as Mayor of Antalya Metropolitan Municipality, was inaugurated by the then-Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım,and the Tünektepe Cable Car was promoted as “Turkey’s lowest-cost cable car.”

That evening, the 9 minutes of happiness for the visitors who boarded the cable car turned into a 23-hour nightmare. The 174 people stranded in the cabins spent the night suspended in the air, thousands of meters high, in constant fear of falling. Among the passengers were small children, mothers, and elderly people. This trauma will never be forgotten. Following a rescue operation that lasted for hours, 173 people were successfully evacuated thanks to the meticulous work of rescue personnel and fire crews. It is necessary to wholeheartedly congratulate all the search and rescue workers who performed their duties under difficult conditions.

However, in the first statement made by AFAD President Okay Memiş regarding the cable car disaster, it was claimed that the cable car pylon had collapsed due to a landslide. According to the preliminary report prepared by the prosecutor's expert committee, it was revealed that pylon number 5, which supported the cable car line, did not collapse due to a landslide, but rather snapped!

The operation of the cable car is under the Antalya Metropolitan Municipality. Therefore, its maintenance and inspection are also the responsibility of the Antalya Metropolitan Municipality. CHP Deputy Chairman Deniz Yavuzyılmaz, stated that the maintenance of the cable car was carried out by a company approved by the Ministry of Industry and Technology.

Human life is at stake! The government and the opposition should not pass the buck to each other.

There is another cable car line in Antalya. The Tahtalı cable car. With a length of 4,350 meters, it is one of the longest cable car lines in the world.The operation and maintenance of the cable car, which was brought to life with Swiss technology, belong to Olympos Teleferik A.Ş, Doppelmayr/Garaventa, and ABB/Frey AG, the companies that built it. Its inspection is conducted by both the Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology and ROTECH Deutschland, the authorized cable car rope inspection bureau in Europe. In other words, two institutions handle the inspection.

As this article was being written, the rescue and evacuation operation had concluded, but many questions remain. The cable car disaster must be investigated with meticulous work, and those responsible must be identified.

Antalya is not only one of Turkey's but also one of the world's attraction centers. Every year, it hosts millions of tourists from all over the world. Antalya has a great responsibility toward the visitors it welcomes from every corner of the globe.

Human life is too important to be left to the conflict between the government and the municipality, which hold different ideologies. Human life is above politics. The essential thing is to preserve life!

If a Swiss citizen had lost their life in the cable car accident, the international community would have taken action, an investigation would have already been launched, and the Turkish State would have been forced to pay high compensation amounts to the family of the deceased.  

Unfortunately, the life of any Turkish citizen living in this country has no value.

25 people lost their lives in the Çorum train accident.

301 miners died in the Soma mine disaster.

The true number of our citizens who lost their lives in the February 6 earthquakes was never even announced.

And most recently, what happened in İliç... Only one of the 9 workers trapped under the soil could be recovered.

And for the cable car disaster, someone will again

call it fate and move on.

Because human life is the cheapest thing in Turkey!