Those are good statistics, but malfunctioning lifts are not what I’m worried about. How many serious accidents were there on lifts which were NOT malfunctioning?
Kuddos to the quick thinking teens.
This past weekend I was on a 4 person chair with a grizzled instructor and a 4 or 5 year old girl learning how to ski going up a big long run.
Instructor explained “I never put the safety bar down, because then the kids think they are safe. When in reality, when they are small they can easily slip under the bar.”
Some stats - these from Colorado: How dangerous are ski chairlifts?
This year there have been two fatalities via falling from lifts that I’m aware of; one in Pennsylvania and one in Quebec. However the girl in Quebec appears to have jumped on purpose.
I don’t understand this. Can somebody explain the physics?
I go skiing every year, and it frequently happens that the chair lift stops briefly. (It’s a slow-moving chair lift, at a very small ski resort.)
There is never any problem .
From the forward momentum, your chair swings very gently forward, and then backward, about two or three times like a pendulum, and then it stops.
You sit there quietly for about 30 or 60 seconds , with the cable and the chairs motionless. Then the cable starts moving again,from a dead stop, with no problems.
Now, I can see why it would be dangerous to reverse direction immediately after the cable has stopped moving (which is instantaneous, when the operator hits the red button, usually because somebody stumbled getting on or off)–because there is still some momentum in the chairs, which are swinging.
But after 60 seconds or so, the chairs are also hanging still, so there is no special force applied in any direction.
So why can the cable not start moving in reverse direction, just like it starts up again moving in the usual direction?
It is simply that the standard operation for the lifts includes a failsafe brake that stops the lift reversing. On the uphill side you have maybe 50-70 loaded chairs and nothing on the downhill and that provides a large mass and large amount of potential energy that has to be controlled. Most lifts are not designed to deal with that amount of mass coming downhill and indeed are designed so as to not allow it all.
Every time the chair stops, anti-rollback mechanisms come into play. These are failsafe in that they operate unless they are positively held open by power or forward motion and lock the cables and wheels to prevent any rollback.
In order to run the chair backwards you would have to either do without such a failsafe or disengage it and that’s not done in anything except extreme circumstances. Even if power fails completely the standard approach is using auxiliary power to get people to the top or a manual evacuation of a static chair rather than rolling them back.
No they are very safe. The only reason this is a thread is because of the noteworthy nature of a very rare accident.
Sit with the bar closed and you’ll have no problems at all because it is very difficult to fall off and pretty much impossible to do so by accident.
You want scary stuff? The resort I ski at has the dubious honour of theworlds worst skiing disaster that far surpasses anything seen on a chairlift.
155 people dead on a funicular railway that I’m sure some people would have chosen over the gondolas.
The lift attendant stopped the lift, albeit late, so as to avoid making the situation worse and for rescuers to gather.
He slid forward off the vinyl (somewhat slippery) upholstered seat between the seat and the safety bar.
With this model, a Pomagalski (Poma) quad/four-person chair, the lowered safety bar is still high enough above the seat and far enough forward in front of the seat for a youngster to slip underneath.
Most likely, the height of the chair’s seat above the lift platform was a bit too high for the child, such that instead of being collected/scooped by the chair, he found himself perched on the leading edge of the chair, and then slipped forward off of it. Usually when this happens, the fall takes place on or immediately following the lift platform before the chair rises to a significant height.
It is possible that the child was squirming about (a child fell off a lift at my local ski area last month by playing about – sometimes unattended children get into mischief on chairlifts, not using the safety bar, swinging their skis and pushing each other), but given that an adult was on the chair, the problem probably was not a result of the child’s behaviour.
The question then is why did the lift attendant not spot the problem and stop the lift earlier.
The lift attendant might have been preparing to load the next party by looking at the next chair to see if its seat was down rather than up, and seeing that all the people about to load were smoothly coasting to the loading point on time.
An observer noted that people were yelling to the lift attendant to stop the lift, but the lift was not immediately stopped, and there was loud music. Although some lift areas do it, it is inexcusable to play music loud enough to make it difficult to recognize people yelling for the lift to be stopped. Even without music, it is easy to miss hearing people yelling from a few chairs further up the line. (On an identical chair last year, even when there was no music, it took several seconds of the voice of god to get the lift attendant to stop the lift when it picked up a octogenarian by the back of his jacket.)
Ironically, the safety bar blocked the adult from pulling the child back onto the chair, but I expect that was for the best, given that there was a wee one between the adult and the child. Had there been no safety bar then the adult and the wee one might have been dragged off the chair by the child who slipped off the chair.
That’s a cultural thing (although I note that in this instance the person in the following chair on the Canadian lift did not have the bar down). Noticeably, before there were helmet law in Canada for motorcyclists, proportionally more Americans than Canadians rode motorcycles without helmets and continue to ride chairlifts with the bar up. For example, at my home hill in Canada, only rebellious youth on snowboards fail to put the bar down, whereas across the border in the USA, proportionally more people do not use the bar. I have received snark across the border (“Well, if you think you need it”) from a patroler when I said “bar” and put the bar down.
One arrived by snowmobile at about five minutes into the longer vid.
That is very likely, but I have to wonder how far the chair travelled before the lift attendant clued in and stopped the chair. My guess is that the child slipped off well before the chair stopped.
Perhaps simple exhaustion? Usually my last run is determined by when I find myself wanting to nod off on the lift.
I started lift area skiing on cross-country skis. I kept getting stuck in a tree cross-country skiing on a hiking trail, so I started going to a lift area to learn how to turn. Eventually a kind soul told me that I could get skis with metal edges that would help with turning. He put me on telemark skis, and I’ve never looked back.
An oldie but a goodie: Destructive Testing, Eskimo Lift, Winter Park, Co., June 18-19 1990.
And then there’s when the cable car track cable frays and tangles while the travel cable moves one car into the mess causing it to fall, and then another car into the mess, causing it to fall, despite the operators having been warned that something was wrong. Vail, Lionshead, 1976. Their errors resulted in four people dying, and eight being injured. I was in the Back Bowls that day, and had been on that gondola the previous day.
That’s safe procedure.
I don’t know if the footrest helps or hinders, but I suspect that it helps more than hinders. On the help side, it gives a person who is slipping off the chair a chance at bracing against something (but it is no guarantee – the kid who fell off this year at my hill was on a lift with a bar and footrest). On the hinder side, it is one more embuggerance for inexperienced or sleepy skiers to have to deal with when getting off the lift, and one size does not fit all when it comes to leg length and comfort.
So if the cable jams, he’ll grab onto the tot as they slip off the chair, rather than him grab the bar with one hand and the tot with the other.
And what his students will learn is that safety bars are not to be used.
When I was skiing in France a few years back some chairs have a safety system called Magnestick but it doesn’t seem to have caught on. The kids basically wear a vest with a metal plate, and there’s an electromagnet in the seat back that keeps them in place.
You have to think about what is happening at the bottom. Skiers are being dumped backwards into the loading area. Huge potential for a massive pile-up. I suppose you could stop the lift every time the chair reaches the bottom, but not the ideal solution.
Where I ski, the lift I use most often also downloads regularly*, so there is no inherent problem with people going down the mountain. But they are facing forward, and the bottom has an area for them to egress the chair and get out of the way. Not true on the uphill loading side. I’m a very experience skier, and would think unloading a chair in reverse operation would be a tricky feat, even at very low speed.
*Gunbarrel at Heavenly. The only way down the mountain on the California side for inexperienced skiers is Roundabout (narrow and tricky), The Face (double black diamond), the Tram or Gunbarrel chair. Skiers download this chair all day long. Sometimes more going down than up, depending on time of day.
Here is the webcam: Lake Tahoe Resort Live Mountain Cam | Heavenly Ski Resort You can watch for yourself!
I’ve ridden chairlifts thousands of times and have only seen one incident that wasn’t related to getting on or off. It was human error (stupidity) as most chairlift accidents are. The lift had stopped for a while and some guys in front of us got impatient. We weren’t very far off the ground yet, so they decided to jump. They sank to their waists in snow. Then the lift started moving so I don’t know what happened after that. There was a lot of swearing. 