Opinion was divided Wednesday over whether flammable ski equipment and clothes contributed to the fate of the victims of Austria's ski-train tragedy by fuelling the mountainside blaze.
The 155 victims on the funicular train which was engulfed by flames Saturday as it headed up the Kitzsteinhorn glacier were predominantly skiers and snowboarders, and kitted out accordingly.
Otto Widetschek, commander of the fire brigade in the southern city of Graz and a specialist in flammable materials, judged that the usual kit of a skier or a snowboarder has a flammable capacity equivalent to 10 liters of petrol.
Two days after the catastrophe, Widetschek and his team carried out an experiment, placing jackets, boots and skis side by side -- as close together as passengers may have been standing in the train -- and setting them alight.
"Everything burned or melted in less than five minutes," he said, adding that the burning equipment released noxious toxic fumes before becoming absolutely unrecognizable.
And "the wax on the skis sparked off an explosion," he said.
But others, including ski wear manufacturers, ruled out that the clothes could have fuelled the fire.
"Ski-wear is not particularly flammable," declared Willy Lodl, spokesman for the clothing firm Intersport.
The deputy president of the Austrian institute for textile research Peter Strappl also waved off assertions against ski togs.
"In the case of a fire like that at Kaprun, all clothes will burn whatever they are," he said.
"The risks are not higher with ski clothing than they are with conventional clothing. Quite the opposite in fact. Cotton burns very easily, much more easily than the polyesters or polyamides used in ski clothing," he added.
Temperatures in the tunnel rapidly reached 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees fahrenheit) when the blaze broke out on Saturday. The victims' bodies were burnt beyond recognition.
The reasons behind the blaze, Austria's worst post-war disaster in which only 12 people survived, are still unclear -- VIENNA (AFP)
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