banditorico
04-19-2006, 03:21 AM
<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/nyregion/19roosevelt.html?hp&ex=1145419200&en=d38b90fc6b5fe6c7&ei=5094&partner=homepage" target="_blank" title="Midair Rescue Lifts Passengers From Stranded East River Tram">Midair Rescue Lifts Passengers From Stranded East River Tram</a></p><div class="byline">By <a title="More Articles by Jennifer 8. Lee" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/jennifer_8_lee/index.html?inline=nyt-per">JENNIFER 8. LEE</a></div>
<p>A four-minute trip on the Roosevelt Island Tramway yesterday turned
into a harrowing ordeal that lasted hours as a series of power failures
left about 70 people suspended hundreds of feet in the air, forcing a
daring late-night rescue over the East River.</p>
<p>About 11 p.m., after the passengers on two tram cars, one headed in
each direction, had been hanging for more than six hours, rescuers
began moving them into a large orange wire gondola from the tram headed
to Roosevelt Island, which was suspended over the East River.
Passengers were pulled from the side door and loaded into the gondola,
which had a capacity of about a dozen people. By midnight, 22 of the
approximately 50 people in the Roosevelt Island-bound tram had been
rescued in two trips, including 12 children and an elderly woman who
was using a walker.</p>
<p>Cheers erupted when the first group, with eight children and five
adults, touched ground at the Roosevelt Island terminal about 11:30
p.m. The children exchanged high-fives with Mayor <a title="More articles about Michael R. Bloomberg." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/michael_r_bloomberg/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Michael R. Bloomberg</a>. They were greeted with juice, cookies and, for several Hasidic Jews in the first group, matzo. </p>
<p>"I felt like I was a movie stuntman a little bit," said Dax Maier,
12, after he was rescued. "I just told myself,'Don't look down.' " Dax
was heading over to Roosevelt Island with his baby-sitter for tennis
lessons.</p>
<p>The second rescue, which was completed at 12:20 a.m. today, took
longer because among the nine passengers was an elderly woman using a
walker and hard of hearing. Because the last portion of the rescue trip
involved climbing down a 10-foot ladder, rescuers had to lower her down
on the pulley. </p>
<p>Early today, rescuers were debating whether to use a crane with a
basket to rescue the passengers who were in the tram suspended over
Manhattan near First Avenue. The people would be brought either onto
the bridge or onto land.</p>
<p>If not, they planned to use the gondola, which had crawled the
3,100-foot-long stretch of cable with self-generated diesel power, to
empty the Manhattan-bound tram, with 22 people — 21 passengers and the
conductor.</p>
<p>Passengers remainedly largely calm as they were transferred from the tram car to the orange gondola in midair. </p>
<p>After the first group arrived, Mr. Bloomberg held a briefing on the
Roosevelt Island side. "We want to get out of this with nobody
injured," he said, "and hopefully we learned something about how this
will not happen again." He also said city officials had talked to
officials at the agency that oversees the tram, the Roosevelt Island
Operating Corporation, , a quasi-public corporation that was set up in
1984 to oversee services to the island. "We will do an evaluation
tomorrow on what went wrong," he said.</p>
<p>The ordeal began shortly before 5 p.m. when the power went out,
leaving the two tram cars, which each can hold 125 people, motionless
on cables that rise as high as 250 feet above the East River between
the East Side of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. </p>
<p>Officials said the diesel generator that powers the system failed,
and then the backup generator stopped working as well. Efforts to
manually crank in the cars back also proved fruitless, officials said. </p>
<p>Anxious relatives and city officials waited on land, squinting
upward and usin
<p>A four-minute trip on the Roosevelt Island Tramway yesterday turned
into a harrowing ordeal that lasted hours as a series of power failures
left about 70 people suspended hundreds of feet in the air, forcing a
daring late-night rescue over the East River.</p>
<p>About 11 p.m., after the passengers on two tram cars, one headed in
each direction, had been hanging for more than six hours, rescuers
began moving them into a large orange wire gondola from the tram headed
to Roosevelt Island, which was suspended over the East River.
Passengers were pulled from the side door and loaded into the gondola,
which had a capacity of about a dozen people. By midnight, 22 of the
approximately 50 people in the Roosevelt Island-bound tram had been
rescued in two trips, including 12 children and an elderly woman who
was using a walker.</p>
<p>Cheers erupted when the first group, with eight children and five
adults, touched ground at the Roosevelt Island terminal about 11:30
p.m. The children exchanged high-fives with Mayor <a title="More articles about Michael R. Bloomberg." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/michael_r_bloomberg/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Michael R. Bloomberg</a>. They were greeted with juice, cookies and, for several Hasidic Jews in the first group, matzo. </p>
<p>"I felt like I was a movie stuntman a little bit," said Dax Maier,
12, after he was rescued. "I just told myself,'Don't look down.' " Dax
was heading over to Roosevelt Island with his baby-sitter for tennis
lessons.</p>
<p>The second rescue, which was completed at 12:20 a.m. today, took
longer because among the nine passengers was an elderly woman using a
walker and hard of hearing. Because the last portion of the rescue trip
involved climbing down a 10-foot ladder, rescuers had to lower her down
on the pulley. </p>
<p>Early today, rescuers were debating whether to use a crane with a
basket to rescue the passengers who were in the tram suspended over
Manhattan near First Avenue. The people would be brought either onto
the bridge or onto land.</p>
<p>If not, they planned to use the gondola, which had crawled the
3,100-foot-long stretch of cable with self-generated diesel power, to
empty the Manhattan-bound tram, with 22 people — 21 passengers and the
conductor.</p>
<p>Passengers remainedly largely calm as they were transferred from the tram car to the orange gondola in midair. </p>
<p>After the first group arrived, Mr. Bloomberg held a briefing on the
Roosevelt Island side. "We want to get out of this with nobody
injured," he said, "and hopefully we learned something about how this
will not happen again." He also said city officials had talked to
officials at the agency that oversees the tram, the Roosevelt Island
Operating Corporation, , a quasi-public corporation that was set up in
1984 to oversee services to the island. "We will do an evaluation
tomorrow on what went wrong," he said.</p>
<p>The ordeal began shortly before 5 p.m. when the power went out,
leaving the two tram cars, which each can hold 125 people, motionless
on cables that rise as high as 250 feet above the East River between
the East Side of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. </p>
<p>Officials said the diesel generator that powers the system failed,
and then the backup generator stopped working as well. Efforts to
manually crank in the cars back also proved fruitless, officials said. </p>
<p>Anxious relatives and city officials waited on land, squinting
upward and usin