Pretty insane, would not want to be on that lift. Apparently people were jumping off as well.
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Snowmaking Pipe Bursts at Beech, Freezing Person to Lift
- Thread starter ThatGuy
- Start date
In a statement from Beech Mountain Ski Resort, the resort said an uninjured guest skied into a water and air hydrant during snowmaking operations.
"The hydrant was under a loaded chair, resulting in several patrons getting wet," the resort said. "Our operations and safety team worked diligently to unload the lift and drain the system safely. Avery EMS transported two patrons to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. We believe everyone is okay outside of the unfortunate situation, and operations are on a regular schedule."
"The hydrant was under a loaded chair, resulting in several patrons getting wet," the resort said. "Our operations and safety team worked diligently to unload the lift and drain the system safely. Avery EMS transported two patrons to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. We believe everyone is okay outside of the unfortunate situation, and operations are on a regular schedule."
Cornhead
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Holy Chit! Can't imagine, a hydrant blew while we were on the chair at Toggenburg, got wet, but that's it. It was loud, patroller asked if we were OK, I said "what?"
Zand
Well-known member
Man...took ski patrol forever to get there to help...glad no one got blasted off the chair. Nice trick how they managed to stop the lift with someone directly in the blast not once, but twice.
Didn't you hear? That is Jay Peak combining the water park and ski experience.
That was just a test for Gore Tex.
Edd
Well-known member
Never had a lift mishap but I like to think I’d be understanding in most cases. If I went through this I’m going to need more than a hot chocolate.
drjeff
Well-known member
Now that's an Arctic Enema!!
catskillman
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Hunter has one of these brewing right where Hellgate and the offramp to D lift. 4 ft pile of ice as of yesterday, looks like a volcano except the discharge is yellowish.
SnowRock
Active member
Was there absolutely no communication between the lift ops and anyone on the hill? How do you not only keep running people through that pressurized freezing cold geyser… but then manage to actually stop the lift multiple times with people directly above it?
raisingarizona
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That’s a North Carolina face shot.
IceEidolon
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Way I hear it, at least one time the chair stopped it was because the brittle bar/tower sensor tripped, not an operator triggered stop. You'd need to get a lift mechanic over to that lift and have them bypass the fault to move the chair after that. That probably excuses one stop over the geyser.
That said, as soon as patrol calls/the first chair of soaking wet riders yells at the top shack operator to stop the fucking lift, they shouldn't have restarted it without eyes and a radio on the problem. Is this covered in a basic lift ops training class, probably not. Does that excuse restarting the lift before the water's turned off? No.
That said, as soon as patrol calls/the first chair of soaking wet riders yells at the top shack operator to stop the fucking lift, they shouldn't have restarted it without eyes and a radio on the problem. Is this covered in a basic lift ops training class, probably not. Does that excuse restarting the lift before the water's turned off? No.
Not Sure
Well-known member
The second time the lift stopped the lone guy was struggling to keep the bar down and lost strength . I'll bet some serious hypothermia set in ,he didn't seem to move the rest of the video. Scary!
drjeff
Well-known member
In one of the videos, you see a snowboarder (possibly THE reported snowboarder who hit and broke the snowmaking water turent off and caused the incident) there trying to gather their facilities and process the geyser they created, in the shot, so the video may literally be less than 30 seconds after the geyser started, so unless there was an employee with a mtn coms link radio right there to call in the emergency, with a snowmaking valve house shut down, it's going to take longer for the line to be turned off, and/or the lifties to process what is going on and how to process it all and then make the proper call@
i just watched the 13 minute video,… seems like complete incompetence! on all of - Mtn ops, lift ops and the ski patrol! How difficult is it to shut the water off? They also should not have run the chair without evacuation of the second guy. He was not moving, bar was up and looked like he was about to go limp and fall out.
machski
Well-known member
More difficult than you realize, it's not like they had a hydrant they could just shut off anymore. With full system pressure having to be halted in the line, it's not a rapid fix. Bottom line is, all should be squarely pointing this blame at the snowboarder for riding far too close to the snowmaking hydrants. Honestly, I cannot count the amount of times I have seen folks ride/ski over snowmaking hose or close to hydrants. Most of the time they are the ones asking for trouble. But in this case, the line was directly beneath a chair and the rider's actions caused many to be injured/inconvenienced.
The incompetence goes even deeper- starts with the design of that system. Snowmaking hydrants in the middle of a trail running right under the chairlift? Forget about the boarder that skied into the hydrant, there’s so much more that could go wrong with a system that is under pressure with a lift directly above.
Shutting the water off is actually fairly simple. Press a button or two in the pump house and at the very least the pumps will start turning off and stop sending water. You wouldn't want to do it in a normal scenario without taking a bunch of other steps. In this case the lift should have been stopped as soon as possible at a point where no loaded chair was in the waters path and the pump should have been shut down immediately. You deal with the issues of a sudden pump shut down later. This could have gone so much worse; rope derailment, etc.
As I saw elsewhere, you hate to armchair QB something like this but it is hard to think of a worse response than what we see in that video.
