50 people remain stuck in cable cars suspended over French Alps

The group got struck on Thursday afternoon in the Vallee Blanche Cable Car that rises to an altitude of nearly 4,000 metres, a local police official said.

It happened on a cable connecting the Aiguille du Midi station in France to the Italian Punta Helbronner.

“There’s nothing fundamentally to fear”, he said.

Mathieu Dechavanne, the head of the cable company, said earlier that the authorities were “in contact with the clients [in the cable cars]”.

French officials say that 110 people are stuck on a series of cable cars over the Mont Blanc massif in the Alps.

Both of the peaks are in the shadow of the famed Mont Blanc. The Vallee Blanche Cable Car operates in the summer season, when large numbers of climbers and tourists converge on the area.

The scenic cable-car journey is 5 km long and usually takes 35 minutes, but passengers have been stuck there for about two hours.

The group had been travelling from Aiguille du Midi to the Hellbronner peak, which is around 11,358 ft above sea level.

Georges-Francois Leclerc, the prefect of the Haute-Savoie region, said 110 people were initially trapped, but 65 were airlifted out by helicopters.

Rescuers were reported to have said they hoped to have everyone safely off the cable vehicle before nightfall.

They alerted authorities and French and Italian mountain rescue specialists were brought by helicopter to evacuate passengers.