Three American mountain climbers were killed and another seriously injured along with four porters in a rockslide on Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, an official and tour operators at Africa’s highest peak said on Thursday.
The dead and injured were in two groups that were hit early on Wednesday by a cascade of falling rocks and boulders dislodged by a strong gust of wind.
The climbers were located above the Arrow Glacier at about 4 877m, on the western breach of the 5 963m mountain that dominates the East African landscape.
”A rapid change of weather forced several rocks to tumble and slide down the gradient,” said James Wakibara, the acting chief warden of Kilimanjaro National Park. ”The rocks hit a group of tourists who were en route to the peak and three were killed.”
”Five other people were seriously injured, among them one American and four Tanzanians,” he said by phone from the base of the mountain where recovery efforts were under way. ”Several others, all Tanzanian porters, sustained various form of minor injuries.”
Wakibara said the seriously injured had been evacuated by a flying doctor service and were being treated at a hospital in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.
One of the wounded, 45-year-old Paul Cunha, a United States citizen from the north-eastern state of New Hampshire, said the rockslide had happened so fast he wasn’t aware of what had happened.
”We were walking up … when we heard cracks but didn’t see where they were coming from. Then, we noticed big rocks coming down so fast and there were so many people climbing at that time,” he said from his Nairobi hospital bed.
”My wife, Carol, was in front of me and the next thing I can remember was people trying to see if I was okay,” Cunha said. ”The rock hit my left shoulder and broke it. Luckily, my wife was not hurt.”
The identities of the dead climbers were not immediately known, but officials at the two mountaineering groups that organised their trips confirmed they were all US citizens.
Wesley Krause, of African Environments, which had 11 clients on Kilimanjaro at the time of the accident, said two of the dead were part of his firm’s group. Zainab Ansell, of Zara Tanzanian Adventures that had 15 clients on the mountain, said the third was in her company’s group.
”A big wind came and blew the rocks down on to them,” Ansell said.
Krause said the climbers were several hours into a morning trek to the peak when they were hit by a freak rockslide that began with several large boulders falling from near the rim of Kilimanjaro’s volcanic crater, about 300m below the summit.
”They came from quite high near the crater rim,” he said by phone from the town of Moshi, at the foot of the mountain in northern Tanzania. ”The initial rocks then cascaded other rocks down. This is a rare, rare occurrence.”
Krause downplayed speculation that the rocks could have been dislodged by melting snow that scientists have blamed on global warming.
He noted that there has not been ice in the area where the slide began for many years.
Scientists have long warned that global warming has degraded the snow and glaciers on the mountain, which was immortalised in Ernest Hemingway’s 1938 short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro and later by a Hollywood film of the same name.
The mountain, which sits near Tanzania’s border with Kenya, provides one of Africa’s most stunning panoramas with its views of wildlife-rich plains below, and thousands of climbing enthusiasts trek up its steep slopes every year. — Sapa-AFP