While the country watched a rescue operation to recover eight people, mostly school boys, stranded in a cable car in the Allai Jhangr Pashto area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Battagram district with bated breath, the media presented conflicting versions of how high the car or chairlift was suspended.

The digital newsroom at Aaj News used Google Maps and geo tools to determine the correct height of the car to be around 600 feet.

Initial reports said the cable car had been stuck at 9,000 feet – a hard-to-believe claim indeed.

Local journalists later put the figure at 6,000 feet which was later revised to 2,000 to 3,000 feet. An official report put the height of the car at 2,000 feet while the National Disaster Management Authority NDMA said it was at 900 feet.

We Google Maps to obtain the longitude and latitude data of the spot and a tool to generate altitude data from these coordinates. It gave us the number we were looking for.

The students in the cable car were making their way to a high school in Jhangri Pashto. The coordinates for the school building were 34.91232707991632, 73.0457402903258. The altitude of the location is 1,890 metres or 6,201 feet from sea level.

The students were travelling from one mountain slop to another. There is a stream called ‘Jhangri Khwar’ between the two mountain slop.

The coordinates for the riverbed centre of the stream are 34.912989908764615, 73.04252231041109. Converting these points into altitude we found this spot is located at a height of 1,687 metres or 5,535 feet from sea level.

By subtracting the altitude of the stream from the altitude of where the school is located we get a figure of 666 feet.

Shortly after we had published our conclusion on Aaj News Urdu a statement from the ISPR said the chairlift had been struck at 600ft.

The stream below the cable car is continuously sloping downward and the distance grows to 700 feet between the riverbed and the altitude at which the school is located.

This was nowhere closer to 2000 meters or 6000 feet. Probably the confusion was caused by reporters and local authorities putting out altitude of the chairlift and not height and newsroom inferring it was ‘height.’

However, while it pales in comparison to the original estimates, 700 feet is by no means a low height. The Ocean Mall in Islamabad is 393 feet tall while the Habib Bank building in Karachi is 303 feet high.

Rescuing someone from this height is a herculean task.