Two Missing In Tunnel Tragedy
The deadly fire is out, but it's still too hot inside an Austrian highway tunnel.
Intense heat and the danger of falling concrete have delayed rescuers from searching for two people still missing.
The fire Saturday left at least one person dead, 49 injured and two dozen vehicles in charred shells. The blaze was set off by a paint truck that plowed into the back of a car.
The crash set off a chain reaction of explosions and a massive blaze, officials said.
Temperatures inside the Alpine passage soared to more than 18-hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Firefighters, who were initially unable to get at the fire because of the intense heat and thick black smoke, had feared the death toll in the north-south Tauern tunnel would rise. It was the second deadly Alpine tunnel fire in just over two months.
At least 60 people were treated in hospitals, three of them in critical condition. About 40 to 50 others escaped without injury.
"I heard screams: 'I am on fire! Help us, help us!'" truck driver Franz Fritzl told Austrian radio.
The blaze was declared under control Saturday afternoon, 12 hours after it had erupted at 4:55 a.m. The tunnel, 40 miles south of Salzburg, is on a road that carries traffic from Germany to Italy and the Balkans.
The only fatality was a German man who collapsed near an emergency phone in the tunnel, rescuers said. His body was recovered.
Large chunks of concrete lining fell from the ceiling and the walls of the four-mile tunnel, complicating rescue efforts.
A similar fire broke out March 24 in the Mont Blanc tunnel linking France and Italy. It took more than a week to recover all the bodies from that fire and the tunnel is expected to remain closed for months, causing traffic chaos in other Alpine routes.
Austrian officials said the Tauern tunnel might have to remain closed all summer, causing enormous problems for vacationers.
Like the Mont Blanc passage between France and Italy, the Tauern is a single-bore tunnel, a design criticized for failing to provide a safe exit the in the event of fire. Some more expensive tunnels have separate tubes for each direction and even a third, smaller tube for escapes.
Austrian regional government officials, rescuers and Red Cross workers immediately demanded that second tubes be added to the Tauern and the roughly parallel Katschberg tunnel.
Firefighters also complained that they were hampered by the lack of fire hydrants.
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