00:00To the middle end of the evening rush hour when suddenly one of Portugal's famed street trams
00:05appeared to somehow jump the tracks and career down the hill out of control before smashing
00:10into a building. A day of national mourning today in Portugal after 15 people were killed,
00:15over 20 others injured as the picturesque electric streetcar, one of Lisbon's biggest
00:19tourist attractions, crashed. Five of the injured in a serious condition. The authorities saying it
00:24appears to have been a simple accident. Well let's get a lot more then by crossing to Lisbon.
00:29I'm going to talk to our correspondent who joins us from there, Sarah Morris. Sarah, just first of all
00:33bring us up to date with the latest from the scene.
00:39Well basically Stuart, you can probably see the streetcar behind me. Now it's made up of two cars
00:46that simultaneously travel up and down that steep hillside and one of them is in a reasonable
00:52condition. That's the one that jolted fairly violently but the one behind is basically just
00:58a crumpled mess. The wreckage is still there on the streets to show you really the violence
01:04of this. That is the streetcar that careered down the hill at a really high rate, say the witnesses,
01:14and basically turned a corner, crashed into a building there. And the police are really
01:21cordoned off this area. The investigation is ongoing as to the causes of the accident. But
01:28the focus at the moment is on whether the security cable actually broke. That cable is key to the
01:36counterbalance between those two wagons. We don't know exactly how many people were on board when this
01:43accident happened. But they have capacity, each of them, for about 40 people sitting and standing
01:50each. And so that death toll of 15, we hope it doesn't rise. But there are many people who have
01:58been injured, some of them seriously and we understand a three-year-old child. Now the autopsies have been
02:04going on overnight. It's a difficult case because, as you know, Stuart, this is a tourist haven, really.
02:14Lots of tourists from all different nationalities have come to Lisbon and they enjoy going on these
02:21streetcars, which date right back into the 19th century, 1885, this one. And so the nationalities means that the
02:26authorities are going to take probably a little bit extra time in going through and identifying all the
02:37victims. Some of those injured are being treated at three hospitals in Lisbon. And as we speak, the mayor of
02:47Lisbon is actually being met at the weekly cabinet office, he's taken the decision to actually suspend the
02:58operation of two other of these funicular trains. While the investigation goes on into the cause of this accident,
03:05we know that the company that maintains it says that all the protocols were met. And so the investigation will
03:14we'll have to look at really why this accident happened. Sarah, just very briefly, I mean, when you think of Lisbon,
03:20you think of these funiculars, don't you? I mean, give us a bit of a sense of the idea of the sense of shock there, I
03:27suppose, from local people.
03:34I think it's still sinking into people in Lisbon. I think they're waking up on this sunny morning, the day after, struggling to
03:42believe that this actually happened and the enormity of it. There had been an incident, I think in 2018, but there
03:48were no, no one injured. And so this, the scale of it is really very shocking. Local people use this funicular as well,
03:59because it links the high area, the barrio alto, to the lower part. And that higher area is a common area for going out.
04:09It's many Lisbon people really struggling to get their heads around this, driving to their businesses and
04:18workplaces this morning, seeing the cordoned off areas and the streets where the cars can't pass.
04:25Thank you, Claudia.
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04:53Thank you, Claudia.
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