An accident occurred in the St. Gallen climbing hall on Monday afternoon. A 57-year-old man suffered life-threatening injuries after falling from a height of ten meters.
According to a police report, a 16-year-old man fell from a height of around ten meters for unknown reasons in the St. Gallen climbing hall on Monday afternoon shortly before 57 p.m. He suffered life-threatening injuries. The emergency services took him to the hospital.
We asked Diego Lampugnani, manager of the St. Gallen climbing hall, for information about the accident. Lampugnani did not want to comment on the accident, citing the ongoing investigation.
Since 2019, only fault-tolerant backup devices have been permitted
Accidents with serious injuries happen very rarely in climbing halls and in the vast majority of cases are due to human error or a mistake by the belaying partner.
In 2018, an accident occurred in the climbing hall in St. Gallen, which luckily turned out to be minor. Since it was assumed that there was a safety error at the time, the St. Gallen climbing hall was one of the first halls in Switzerland to tighten its regulations regarding safety devices. In order to counteract application errors when backing up, only semi-automatic safety devices have been permitted since the beginning of 2019.
It is currently unclear whether a safety failure also caused the tragic accident on Monday afternoon and is the subject of ongoing investigations.
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Credits: Cover picture S. Tsuchiya