A passenger is rescued after a Sandia Peak Tramway car was stranded overnight on New Year's Eve on Saturday, Jan. 1, 2022, in Albuquerque, N.M.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — New Mexico search and rescue crews used ropes and helicopters Saturday, Jan. 1, to rescue 21 people who were stranded overnight in two tram cars after an iced-over cable caused the cars to get stuck high up in the Sandia Mountains overlooking Albuquerque.

Lt. Robert Arguelles a Bernalillo County Fire Department spokesperson, said that crews first rescued 20 people stranded in one car and several hours later rescued a 21st person stranded by themselves in a second car.

All the people on the two cars were employees of the Sandia Peak Aerial Tramway or a mountaintop restaurant, and the 20 in one car were being ferried down to the base of the mountains at the end of their workdays, Arguelles said.

The other employee had been heading up the mountain to provide overnight security when the tram system shut down Dec. 31 due to icing, Arguelles said.

There were no reported injuries among those stranded, Arguelles said. “More just pretty frustrated.”

To rescue the 20 people in the one car, operators were able to move it to a nearby support tower more than halfway up the mountain, and search and rescue personnel early Jan. 1 hiked to the area and climbed the tower to deliver blankets and other supplies to those inside the heated car, Arguelles said.

Search and rescue personnel over several hours used ropes and other equipment to lower the stranded employees about 85 feet to the ground before escorting them to a nearby landing zone in the steep and rocky terrain where the tower was located, Arguelles said.

The 20 people were then ferried by helicopter several at a time to the base of the mountains, he said.

Arguelles said the second car with the one employee aboard was higher up the mountain and at location where the car was too high above the ground to lower people by ropes.

But the tram system was able to inch the second car down the cable to the rescue site at the support tower, and rescuers then used ropes to lower the 21st person as was done with the others, Arguelles said.

Brian Coon, a tramway system manager, said there was an unusually fast accumulation of ice on one of the cables that made it droop below the tram, making it dangerous to keep going, KOB-TV reported.

S Korea: Unidentified person crosses border into North Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s military said Sunday, Jan. 2, that an unidentified person crossed the heavily fortified border into North Korea.

The person was earlier spotted by surveillance equipment at the eastern portion of the border, known as the Demilitarized Zone, but avoided capture by South Korean troops on Jan. 1. The surveillance later detected the person crossing the border, Joint Chiefs of Staff officers said.

South Korea sent a message to North Korea to ensure the safety of the person, but the North hasn’t responded, the officers said requesting anonymity citing department rules.

It was unclear if this was a rare case of a South Korean hoping to defect to the North, or it could be a North Korean who briefly entered the South Korean territory for some reason before returning to the North.

In September 2020, North Korea fatally shot a South Korean fisheries official found floating in its waters along a poorly marked sea boundary. South Korea said that North Korea troops were under orders to shoot anyone illegally crossing the border to protect against the coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier in 2020, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un placed a border city under total lockdown after a North Korean defector with COVID-19-like symptoms sneaked back home. The fate of that defector, who had lived in South Korea, is not known.

On Jan. 1, North Korea announced it had decided to place top priority on strict virus restrictions at a high-profile ruling party meeting last week.

The two Koreas are split along the world’s most heavily armed border, called the Demilitarized Zone. An estimated 2 million mines are peppered inside and near the 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide DMZ, which is also guarded by barbed wire fences, tank traps and combat troops on both sides.

Defecting via the DMZ is rare. At the height of their Cold War rivalry, both Koreas sent agents and spies to each other’s territory through the DMZ, but no such incidents have been reported in recent years.

About 34,000 North Koreans have defected to South Korea since the late 1990s to avoid poverty or political oppression, but a vast majority of them have come via China and Southeast Asian countries.

North Korea has yet to report any cases of the coronavirus while experts have questioned its claim of a perfect record.