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Jun 18, 2008, 8:53 AM
| #1 (permalink) |
  Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 177
| Scathing Mt. Bachelor lift Ops article - POWDR and Killington Related It's hard to tell who hates POWDR more...Bachelor or Killlington. http://www.bendliving.com/biz/hanging_in_the_balance/ http://www.killingtonzone.com/forums...hp?f=1&t=23151 HANGING IN THE BALANCE The lack of oversight coupled with the drive for profit and safety issues collide at Mt. Bachelor. A former lift operations manager tells her story of a management team that ignored her constant warnings about lift maintenance and skier safety. by KEVIN MAX On January 11, 2008, Mt. Bachelor lift maintenance manager Caroline Sherrer did what she was supposed to do: She scurried out to the base of the Pine Marten lift after lift operators had suddenly shut it down. The anti-collision safety device that prevents lift chairs from crashing into each other had been overridden by new mechanics, Sherrer said, causing a dangerous clustering of chairs in the loading area. Skiers already on the lift had to be evacuated by running the chair in reverse, a rarely used process in the industry. For Mt. Bachelor’s guests, problems with chairlifts had become a common and frustrating refrain. Remorse rose to rumblings of skiers who’d paid $56 for a day pass or $1,000 per season pass. These constant lift breakdowns— in a season where the mountain’s prices jumped on the president’s promise of better service—were becoming an ongoing mockery. Now this. Sherrer redirected the waiting skiers to the Sunshine lift and then turned her attention to the problem on Pine Marten. Years of practice had taught her patience in these matters. She had been a lift operations manager at Keystone and Telluride ski resorts, worked on lifts at Hoodoo, done gondola maintenance at Steamboat, helped build lifts at Mt. Hood Meadows and Telluride, and had managed and trained lift crews over a fifteen-year career in the industry. Mt. Bachelor was a new challenge. Never, Sherrer said, had she encountered a system of lifts so neglected as the ones she was expected to load visitors on at Mt. Bachelor. A single mother of two teenagers, Sherrer had no backup plan, just the feeling that she didn’t want the responsibility of the potential disaster unfolding at Mt. Bachelor. After two and a half seasons with Mt. Bachelor, and now evacuating guests in reverse from the Pine Marten lift, the latest in a litany of problems, Sherrer walked back to her office and typed her letter of resignation. “I can’t work for a company that won’t take their guests and employees’ safety seriously,” she said in a later interview. “Not only that, they have been breaking the law on a regular basis—bypassing safety that shouldn’t have been while operating to the public, not doing the proper maintenance—but they’ve been doing it knowingly. Any time I brought it up, they would just point the finger at me and tell me that I was just trying to cause trouble. I was just doing my job and doing it the way I had in every other ski resort. ” Sherrer reluctantly left her crew of eighty-five lift operators. “They’d come to me and tell me everything that was broken, and I couldn’t get anything done for them,” she said. “I walk away from this job feeling like I was a failure. ” In her short tenure at Mt. Bachelor, Sherrer had seen too much. A lift chair on the Rainbow lift was barely hanging on the haul rope, a simple cotter pin broken. Luckily a lift operator saw it and reportedly easily pulled it off the line before the next guests rode it up the face of the mountain. But the daily bypasses of safety devices, Sherrer said, were what frustrated and frightened her. She had her lift operators keep daily logs of safety bypasses on every lift, as is required. Her logs show that the Northwest and Summit lifts, in particular, were running more on hope than health. (Click here to see safety bypass logs.) “That’s very serious,” Sherrer said. “The safety issues have redundancies, but they’re there for a reason. Once again it comes back to the fact that there’s no proper maintenance being done on these lifts and that Mt. Bachelor is not governed by anyone. ” Sherrer began sending urgent emails all the way up Mt. Bachelor’s corporate ladder. (See page 83.) She documented her concerns in emails to the recently departed Powdr Corp. chief financial officer, Rick DesVaux, to John Cumming, president of Powdr Corp, and eventually to the ski area’s insurer, Aon. To no avail. A recent email from Bend Business Review soliciting comment from Mt. Bachelor president, Matt Janney brought this reply on May 1, 2008: “… Mt. Bachelor maintains lift logs and maintenance records for each lift. We share those records with the Forest Service as required under the terms of our Special Use Permit, and an annual lift inspection is conducted by a qualified tramway engineer under contract with Mt. Bachelor’s insurance company. This inspection is required under our Special Use Permit, and is monitored by the Forest Service. These inspections have not uncovered any major issues and all minor issues are immediately addressed. Our lifts are operated to manufacturers specifications, guest safety is not being compromised and all conditions of Mt. Bachelor’s Special Use Permit with the Forest Service are being met.” The Dark Side of an (Under) Regulated Industry in Oregon This past spring’s flap in the airline industry is an apt analogy for tramway regulation in Oregon. In March hundreds of commercial airline flights were grounded (and millions of dollars lost) after whistleblowers exposed the ongoing failure of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to inspect airlines for adequate maintenance. The lives of millions of passengers had been jeopardized, and the FAA fumbled to push the teeth of enforcement back into its soft gums. The agency, suddenly remembering the second half of its role as a federal regulatory agency, began calling for confirmation that airlines were actually complying with FAA standards. Oversight of aerial passenger tramways in Oregon is, likewise, more gum than tooth. Oregon, and many other states, has no robust regulating body. Safety of tramways, essentially, falls into a just-trust-us environment in an industry where profit margins are low but profit motives high. Mary Bennett, former director of accounting at California’s Alpine Meadows Ski Area, a Powdr Corp. property for thirteen years, had a bird’s eye view of how Powdr Corp.’s financial management affected operations. “When Powdr Corp. bought Alpine Meadows, it was, defer whatever maintenance you can defer, and hopefully we’ll have enough money next year,” said Bennett. “Alpine pretty much lost money except for one year.” Bennett worked for Alpine Meadows for twenty years (including her final two years under Alpine Meadows general manager Matt Janney) and said she had almost daily contact with Powdr Corp.’s CFO Rick DesVaux, who recently left Powdr. “The more they could slash, the more that went into Powdr Corp.’s pockets,” Bennett said. “Everybody had their budget line, and they’d send it to Powdr Corp. It would come back and say, we need to slash $200,000, and where can we slash it? ” As with Alpine Meadows, Mt. Bachelor sits on U.S. Forest Service land. Because of the federal jurisdiction, the State of Oregon has only a cursory relationship with Mt. Bachelor and other Oregon ski areas in National Forests. Ski areas are treated like carnival rides in the State of Oregon. The ski area administrator can check the box that most closely matches one of four types in its application: Kiddie ride, high ride, circular ride and flat ride. The licensing fee of $25 is waived for the federal agency. Mark Long, of the Oregon State Building Codes Division noted that, under Oregon statute, the state assumes that the federal agency enforces a higher standard than state code and that exempts ski areas from state regulation. The state workplace safety agency, Oregon OSHA, responds to accidents that involve Mt. Bachelor employees, but has no oversight of its lift operations. What little oversight there is for Mt. Bachelor comes from the U.S. Forest Service. While the Forest Service is the primary agency for oversight, its actual role is secondary. The relationship between the Forest Service and Mt. Bachelor is defined by a special-use permit granted by the Forest Service. Under the special-use permit, Mt. Bachelor’s lift operations are bound by the minimum safety standards of ANSI code (American National Standards Institute). Mt. Bachelor’s operating plan filed with the Forest Service notes as Mt. Bachelor’s responsibilities, among others, to, “Make routine inspections of all lifts in compliance with the ANSI Code and keep required records of inspections.” For its part, the Forest Service agrees to “monitor lifts to assure they are in compliance with ANSI requirements.” But the crux of the Forest Service’s oversight—its job in protecting guests on the federal property—comes down to the difference between “monitoring” lift operations and the higher standard of “inspecting” lift operations. Between these two concepts, safety oversight is greatly diminished. First, federal standards require that, “each aerial tramway shall be inspected annually by an aerial tramway specialist independent of the owner.” The Forest Service, however, doesn’t actually “inspect” the lifts, it takes a secondary role as a “monitor” during inspections that are done by an engineer from the mountain’s insurance company. “… The [Forest Service] does NOT do inspections of the lifts,” John Davis, the Bend- Fort Rock Ranger District media coordinator, wrote in an email. “Lifts are inspected by the insurer.” By comparison, the State of Colorado’s tramway board replaces this conflict of having an inspector who has financial ties to the operation he is inspecting. In Colorado, an inspection from a ski resort’s insurer does not pass muster for tramway board compliance. “In Colorado, the licensees may or may not have an insurance inspection. That is up to the licensee,” said Lawrence Smith, the supervisory tramway engineer for the Colorado’s tramway safety board (CPTSB). “Being as the insurance industry is a competitive market, the insurance inspections may differ from the CPTSB inspections. …The CPTSB has a staff of six consulting engineers who are trained by the supervisory tramway engineer that complete the inspections.” Things are different in Oregon. Typically, Mt. Bachelor’s insurance company’s engineer inspects each lift each fall, making a checklist of things that need to be fixed. The engineer then files a copy of that list with the local Forest Service. The Forest Service, however, could not produce an inspection report by Aon, Mt. Bachelor’s insurer for the 2006-2007 season. Repeated emails to district ranger Phil Cruz and Mt. Bachelor’s special- use permit administrator, Rick Wesseler, to obtain this mandatory report were ignored. A representative from Aon would only say that, “You’re going to have to talk to Powdr.” Powdr Corp. has been unresponsive in all communication over this history of this two-part series on Mt. Bachelor. The Forest Service did, however, produce an inspection report for that year under the letterhead of MountainGuard, Mt. Bachelor’s insurer throughout Powdr Corp.’s tenure with the exception of the 2006-2007 season. Neither the Forest Service, nor the insurance agencies would comment on why there was no report from Aon and why MountainGuard, filed an inspection report during a year when it was not Mt. Bachelor’s insurer. Further, Jimmy Lawrence, from MountainGuard, said that MountainGuard has never had a relationship with the Nevada-based engineer Joe Gmuender, who filed the inspection report. When asked why Gmuender has been filing lift inspection reports to a federal agency on behalf of MountainGuard, Lawrence would not comment. Gmuender did not return six calls seeking comment. After the Inspector Leaves Not only are Mt. Bachelor’s lifts inspected by someone in a financial relationship with the mountain, with the Forest Service in the back seat, but this inspection is also done just once each year and is pre-announced and off-season. Sherrer finds this arrangement infrequent and unrealistic. “The summer is announced—they make an appointment well in advance,” she said. “So obviously they have a lot of advance notice to spruce things up. The lifts are not operating, and there are no weather issues to deal with, which is when [Mt. Bachelor] decides they need to jump safeties out to keep the lift moving. And no operators are interviewed, and lift operation logs and documents aren’t checked. All the safeties can work. It’s just keeping them on and active during operating hours and in the inclement weather—that is the challenge for them.” The Forest Service district ranger gets a letter from Mt. Bachelor’s president confirming that all of the repairs have been made. But other than this, there is no documentary reason to believe that federal safety standards have been met—that any crucial lift repairs have been made. Neither MountainGuard, nor engineer Gmuender would return calls and emails seeking further documentation; Aon referred all questions to Powdr Corp. and Mt. Bachelor; Mt. Bachelor also would not provide its lift maintenance logs for review. Forest Service engineer Marcos Romero said that he does, indeed, check maintenance and safety bypass logs and do follow-up visits. Romero said in an interview that he personally makes regular “visual” monitoring visits to the mountain and checks lift operation logs, including more than eight visits this season. Yet the Forest Service, a federal agency, driven by the minutia of government protocol, could provide scant documentation that these visits had actually happened. The agency could identify only three times over Powdr’s entire seven-year tenure when the agency made any visit for monitoring after the fall inspection, with two of those coming in February 2008. Notably, until Bend Business Review arranged a meeting this April, Romero, whose function as the Forest Service’s oversight of lift safety, had never met lift operations manager Sherrer, who oversaw the safety of all lifts at Mt. Bachelor. Further, Sherrer said no one from the Forest Service, nor her supervisor, had ever asked her or her lift operators for their log of safety bypasses, a requisite document under federal code and Mt. Bachelor’s special use permit. Romero nevertheless concluded that public safety is paramount. “I’m concerned,” he said after hearing Sherrer’s experience as lift operations manager. “[Overseeing Mt. Bachelor operations] is not my full-time job. We’re in a monitoring role. … I don’t get out there as much as I’m allowed to.” At the time of publication, Romero and Mike Lane, Forest Service regional tramway engineer, said, after meeting with Sherrer, they would look into her allegations. The Forest Service would not say whether a formal investigation was proceeding. In May, Powdr Corp. fired four top executives at Mt. Bachelor including: president Matt Janney; director of marketing Carly Carmichael, director of operations, Ernie Pool; and director of food and beverage Mark Perry. Powdr Corp. chief operating officer Herwig Demschar told local media that the new management would be more skilled in communications and public relations. Absent was commentary about the company’s commitment to fixing the lift system that angered Mt. Bachelor’s guests and drove away Sherrer. Sherrer’s fears were that lift repairs were not being made in conformity with federal minimum standards, or even being done at all. Her skepticism is shared by a lift mechanic at then-Powdr Corp.-owned ski areas of Boreal, Soda Springs and Alpine Meadows, who worked under thengeneral manager Matt Janney. “Things that were being done there were not being done to manufacturer and state requirements,” the mechanic said, asking not to be identified for fear of retaliation. Former employees from these ski areas have verified this mechanic’s employment, tenure and veracity. “And certain risks were being taken. Papers were being signed and the maintenance didn’t happen. I kind of got to the point where I refrained from signing something. |
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Jun 18, 2008, 8:53 AM
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  AlpineZone Supporter | |
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Jun 18, 2008, 1:44 PM
| #3 (permalink) |
 Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: MA
Posts: 337
| interesting...especially if you read some of the emails. While not related to the lifts I found this part of the email interesting: his is a great mountain in beautiful central Oregon...we should be thriving here. Why on a snow year, where the [Northwest} has some of the best skiing conditions in the US are our skier visits down? I fear word of mouth alone has damaged our reputation. People undervalue word of mouth, and all I hear when I go out in the community are negative remarks about the mountain, and it really hurts to hear this. |
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Jun 19, 2008, 11:07 AM
| #4 (permalink) | |
| Join Date: Sep 2005
Posts: 177
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Jun 19, 2008, 11:24 AM
| #6 (permalink) | |
 Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Southeast NH
Posts: 3,941
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Put it this way. You'd (though knowing your demeanor it would be to a lesser degree) be probably rather vocal if Sundown decided to only operate from December 20th through March 1st, dropped night skiing and the mogul program and said despite all this, they are cutting these costs to re-invest in a better weekend product. While I agree it gets tiring to read and discuss considering it's been going on for a year, I don't expect the Killington customers to pipe down any time soon.
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Jun 19, 2008, 3:33 PM
| #8 (permalink) | |
  Join Date: Jul 2004
Posts: 628
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I have read nothing indicating that these are good guys. To the contrary, they operate like bean-counting douchenozzles with a chronic inability to see the forest for the trees and a habitual disdain for the truth. You are essentially asking us to ignore the fact they they are pissing on our face and telling us it's raining. No thanks. There are few angels in any business doing things out of the goodness of their heart, let alone in the ski industry. Owners risk their capital and are entitled to earn a decent return on that. However, such return should not come at the expense of guest safety, the well-being of local communities, and other key stakeholders. I don't even compare them to the level of stewardship exhibited by the MRG co-op, which really isn't fair and doesn't represent a reasonable standard for most ski resorts to aspire to. But these guys make companies like AIG look good. Say what you want about AIG and their ownership of Stowe, but they are clearly committed to the mountain and the area for the long-term and they don't try to nickel and dime their guests by eliminating or reducing services/operating hours that are fundamental to the guest experience. I will choose not to be hood-winked by these clowns and I plan to continue to call them out on the carpet for the continued half-truths, blatant lies and offenses to my basic sense of what's right and what's wrong. | |
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