New high speed lift at Camelback official discussion thread

[GrilledSteezeSandwich]

2 hours ago, saltyant said:

Take it to the Black Canyon Gondola thread

 

This 

[toast21602]

Just now, GrilledSteezeSandwich said:

This 

That

[saltyant]

Who gave my thread 1 star? We need to get it back to a 5 star rating, so we need every available man, woman and child to rate this thread 5 stars.

[GrilledSteezeSandwich]

1 hour ago, saltyant said:

Who gave my thread 1 star? We need to get it back to a 5 star rating, so we need every available man, woman and child to rate this thread 5 stars.

I just did 

[saltyant]

3 minutes ago, GrilledSteezeSandwich said:

I just did 

Thanks, but now the rating went from 3 stars to 2.5 stars.... make sure you click on all 5 stars

[GrilledSteezeSandwich]

1 minute ago, saltyant said:

Thanks, but now the rating went from 3 stars to 2.5 stars.... make sure you click on all 5 stars

Oh I thought I’m just supposed to click the first star since this thread is number 1

[Ski2Live Live2Ski]

11 hours ago, Shadows said:

How many non ski related gondys are there? Barcelona has one right? Played it on Tony hawk.

Lots of amusement parks - Great Adventure for one

[Schif]

Knoebels has one

[saltyant]

23 minutes ago, Schif said:

Knoebels has one

A regular ski lift, but not a gondola...

[enjoralas]

Not many enclosed gondolas at amusement parks besides the Skyliner at WDW, but plenty of the open air, seated style. Great Adventure and Busch Gardens Williamsburg are probably the two closest to us. 
 

Interestingly, the Scenic Skyway chairlift at Knoebels is an actual ski lift, bought secondhand and repurposed.

[Lift Blog]

I posted some pictures of the new Sunbowl on my blog this week:

https://liftblog.com/2020/10/30/news-roundup-201/

[Ski2Live Live2Ski]

18 hours ago, enjoralas said:

Not many enclosed gondolas at amusement parks besides the Skyliner at WDW, but plenty of the open air, seated style. Great Adventure and Busch Gardens Williamsburg are probably the two closest to us. 
 

Interestingly, the Scenic Skyway chairlift at Knoebels is an actual ski lift, bought secondhand and repurposed.

Doesn't make much sense to have gondolas glassed in for summer use unless they had AC as WDW does.

Edited October 30, 2020 by Ski2Live Live2Ski

[Ski2Live Live2Ski]

1 hour ago, Lift Blog said:

I posted some pictures of the new Sunbowl on my blog this week:

https://liftblog.com/2020/10/30/news-roundup-201/

Thought they might have started it closer to the hotel. Looks like it is just where the old one was. Seems like a lot of work for nothing unless the old one was beyond repair. I guess they got some hype out of it but followed by disappointment when folks figure out is a non detachable lift with 50 feet or so of elevation 

[Lift Blog]

The finished product:

https://liftblog.com/sunbowl-camelback-pa/

[GrilledSteezeSandwich]

53 minutes ago, Lift Blog said:

The finished product:

https://liftblog.com/sunbowl-camelback-pa/

Thanks for posting cool pictures. And not that bad of of a walk for hotel guests. 

[Shadows]

The hotel in the background? That's far AF. And that lift is only for transport now? Skiing the run under it would be pointless with the new offload point.

[enjoralas]

On 11/23/2020 at 10:54 PM, Shadows said:

The hotel in the background? That's far AF. And that lift is only for transport now? Skiing the run under it would be pointless with the new offload point.

It depends on how much elevation the offload station has. If you can make it back up the slight incline to the Sunbowl run it won’t be bad. 

[enjoralas]

Putting down the first layer on the lazy river . . . 

[toast21602]

https://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-nws-little-transparency-after-camelback-accidents-20210618-3frejvs7dfbtlcfhvstnegbgvy-story.html

 

Doug Mackie thought he was being polite when he gave up his seat on a ski lift to a family of three at Camelback Resort in March.

It was a decision that saved him from being seriously injured.

 

The boy, girl and their father, who took Mackie’s spot, fell 15 feet from the Sullivan Express when the chair they were riding detached from the ski lift cable near the top of the mountain. The family was taken away by a St. Luke’s University Health Network ambulance.

“It happened in slow motion,” recalled Mackie, of Palmerton. “We saw the whole thing. The kid’s screaming, the father’s groaning. I could hear the little girl. I’m sure everybody else was screaming as well, but the little girl, her voice was high soprano. And the ski patroller in front of me, he couldn’t do a damn thing.”

The fall was one of at least two accidents at the Pocono Township, Monroe County, resort so far this year that left patrons injured. In May, an 8-year-old girl was hurt after falling from a zip line. A spokesperson for the state Department of Agriculture, which regulates amusement attractions, said the agency is finalizing its investigation.

Ski lifts generally have an outstanding safety record, and although mechanical malfunctions have caused headline-grabbing accidents, most injuries are the result of errors by lift operators or users. Incidents such as the one at Camelback are unusual, said Peter Leffe, a skiing industry expert who retired after 25 years testifying in court cases over ski area injuries.

In Pennsylvania, where there are more than 30 ski areas and amusement parks that operate chair lifts, little information about safety inspections or accidents is public unless the operator releases it itself.

Officials have not released the names of those injured in either Camelback incident, the extent of the injuries or an update on their condition.

However, an online fundraiser to cover medical expenses for the trio in the ski lift accident, which so far has raised over $18,000, detailed a father with serious injuries requiring multiple surgeries, a 12-year-old boy who needed at least one surgery and a 9-year-old girl who was hospitalized.

Efforts to reach the organizer of the fundraiser and the injured man were not successful.

A spokesperson for Camelback’s parent company, KSL Resorts, said it is working closely with the state on its investigation of the Sullivan Express incident and testing is still being performed. Camelback’s managing director Shawn Hauver said in a statement that the safety of guests and employees is the company’s highest priority.

“To ensure safe and proper operations, we work closely with both the state and manufacturers of our ski lifts, slides and other attractions, maintaining consistent compliance inspections and certification requirements that meet and often exceed, industry standards. Once the investigation is complete, we will work with the state and lift manufacturer to safely reopen the Sullivan lift,” Hauver said.

Ski lifts are regulated by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry Bureau of Occupational and Industrial Safety’s elevator division. Lifts, broadly defined as aerial tramways, are built and maintained according to specifications published by the American National Standards Institute, which are adopted by the state. Under state law, ski lifts must be inspected at least once a year and the inspector must submit a written report. In cases of accidents involving death or hospitalization, the owner of the lift must submit an accident report within 24 hours.

The department publishes data on elevators and lifting devices including ski lifts in an online database that includes the location of lifts, the dates of inspections, the name of the inspectors and whether the lift passed or failed the inspection. The database does not allow users to access detailed information about the inspections or the reasons why a lift failed an inspection.

The database shows that one lift at Camelback failed a routine inspection in November 2020 and another lift failed inspections in October and December 2019. Because the database identifies lifts by number and not the name used by the resort, it is unclear whether either lift that failed inspections is the one involved in the fall.

Records in the database also show that lifts at Jack Frost Big Boulder ski areas in Kidder Township failed inspections on three occasions in 2020 and once in 2016. At Blue Mountain Resort in Carbon County, a T-bar style lift, which tows riders uphill on their skis, failed an inspection in 2017. Other resorts in Berks, Carbon and Monroe counties had no recent failures and all lifts in the area passed their most recent inspections, according to the database.

Vail Resorts, which operates Jack Frost Big Boulder, issued a statement that it puts the highest value on the safety of its guests and that its lifts are regularly inspected internally and by state agencies but it did not respond to questions about the failed inspections.

The Morning Call requested records on the Camelback incident and others related to ski lift regulation, including accident reports, but the Department of Labor & Industry denied the request under an exception for records related to noncriminal investigations. The newspaper has appealed to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records arguing that routine inspection reports and sanctions for violations are not subject to the exception.

Labor & Industry Press Secretary Sarah DeSantis said the department conducts safety inspections and investigations of privately-owned equipment to protect the public. When there is an accident investigation, the department provides information to the public if it results in a fine or other penalty.

However, there have been no punitive actions in the past 10 years, DeSantis said in an email Friday morning.

The department’s focus is on compliance, she said, arguing it promotes safety. So, when an inspector finds a piece of equipment not in compliance, the department works with the owner to fix it.

DeSanits added that equipment owners also have the right to release the details of an investigation themselves.

Dave Byrd, director of risk and regulatory affairs at the National Ski Areas Association, said it’s reasonable that any business would choose not to comment on an incident that is under investigation or the subject of potential litigation. Likewise, government agencies generally have policies of not commenting on investigations or releasing documents while an incident is under investigation.

The National Ski Areas Association has tracked ski lift incidents since 1973 and reports 30 fatalities related to ski lifts through 2020. The number excludes medical emergencies or user error such as horseplay leading to a fall and worker fatalities that would be considered industrial accidents. Only 14 were the result of mechanical malfunctions, with the most recent death occurring in 2016, the industry group said.

Based on the distance traveled by more than 18 billion riders since it started tracking fatalities, riding a ski lift is far safer than traveling by car, the association said.

“Chairlifts at ski areas are by far the safest form of mass public transportation out there,” Byrd said.

Ski lift accidents resulting in injury and death have happened in Pennsylvania.

In the March 21 incident at Camelback, the four-seat chair detached from the lift cable near the top of the mountain and sent the passengers plummeting to the slope below. They were identified as a 40-year-old man who suffered back and hip injuries, a 12-year-old with an arm injury and a 9-year-old with an abdominal injury, according to an archived 911 radio dispatch.

On New Year’s Day in 2019, a 17-year-old boy died after a fall from a lift at Blue Mountain Resort in Lower Towamensing Township. Connor Golembiewski of Flemington, New Jersey, died of multiple blunt-force trauma as a result of the fall and his death was ruled accidental, according to the coroner’s office. The coroner’s office reported state police were investigating whether the lift’s safety bar was lowered when Golembiewski fell. Golembiewski’s parents alleged in a federal lawsuit against Tuthill Corp., then owner of the resort, that their son’s death was a result of negligent operation of the lift, but the case settled in August 2020 for $20,000.

Five people were injured in December 2017 at Tussey Mountain in Boalsburg, Centre County, when a malfunction caused a chair on a lift to break loose and slide into four other chairs. The injuries were reported to be minor. Tussey Mountain posted on its Facebook page days after the accident that the initial Department of Labor & Industry investigation found spring packs that allow the chairs to grip the lift cable were weakened, allowing a chair to slip and caused the chain reaction. The ski area said in its Facebook post it would replace the entire grip system on the lift before reopening.

According to Liftblog, a website that tracks ski lift construction and accidents across North America, the lift involved in the fall at Camelback is a detachable quad, meaning its four-seat chairs are designed to detach from the lift cable to move slowly through stations allowing riders more time to load and unload. It was manufactured by the Austrian firm Doppelmayer and installed in 1995.

Liftblog noted that Doppelmayer detachable lifts have been involved in similar incidents elsewhere. An empty chair fell from the “Sunrise Express” lift in 2015 at Mount Bachelor in Oregon, according to a news report. No one was injured. A skier suffered minor injuries in July 2019 when a chair detached from a Doppelmayer lift at Thredbo Ski Resort in Australia during a freak wind gust. An unoccupied chair fell from the same lift three years earlier, also during high winds, but no one was injured, according to the Australian Broadcasting Company.

A spokesperson for Doppelmayer said the company is working with Camelback and state officials to determine the root cause of the incident.

“We take every incident very seriously and take according measures to improve our technology continuously to offer safety on the highest level,” the spokesperson said.

Fifteen states have agencies dedicated to overseeing and inspecting ski lifts and they differ depending on the size of the ski industry in each state. Some, like Pennsylvania, also inspect elevators and other industrial equipment, Byrd said.

But all work under the same American National Standards Institute specifications adopted by Pennsylvania and the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees the 124 ski areas on national forest land, Byrd said.

Pennsylvania also participates in twice-yearly meetings with other state and federal agencies, he said.

In Colorado, where skiing is a large part of both the state’s identity and economy, a culture of transparency in the regulation of lifts and information sharing between operators has developed over the last five decades, said Paul Rauschke, a retired professor of ski area operations at Colorado Mountain College.

A major catalyst, Rauschke said, was a 1976 ski gondola disaster in which a mechanical failure caused two gondola cars each carrying six people to plunge 125 feet to the mountain below. Four of the passengers were killed and the other eight seriously injured.

The state Passenger Tramway Safety Board is an agency dedicated to inspecting ski lifts and investigating accidents. It inspects lifts twice each season, once before operations begin for the winter and again in an unannounced inspection. Its meetings are public and discipline against operators is posted on a state website.

The state is also home to the Rocky Mountain Lift Association, which started as a resource for ski lift operators in Colorado’s ski country but now provides training on lift maintenance and safety for ski area employees across the United States and Canada.

“Here in Colorado we run lifts longer and harder than anywhere else in the world and we’ve learned a lot from that,” Rauschke said.

Byrd said over the last several decades, “the ski industry has made enormous progress in improving the safety of chairlift operations.” Efforts include investing millions to upgrade ski lifts, training lift mechanics and operators and educating skiers on safe lift riding procedures.

“This includes the state of Pennsylvania, which has an active maintenance and operations training program at the state level,” Byrd said.

Speaking generally about mechanical failures on ski lifts and not specifically about the Camelback incident, Rauschke said they are a result of combinations of circumstances, such as deferred maintenance and operator error.

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“A chair doesn’t just one day decide it’s going to fall off,” he said. “There are things that come together to cause the accident.”

Mackie, who was at Camelback to celebrate his 54th birthday with his 13-year-old son, said he’s never felt comfortable on ski lifts and was left shaken by the incident. He described how a sudden stop jerked the cable like a bullwhip, jostling everyone on the lift and causing the family to fall.

“When you hit stop at the bottom, that wave traveled up the cable and it got to us and everybody, me included, went sailing left and right,” Mackie said.

While he couldn’t say what caused the fall, he said Camelback responded to the situation well. But after speaking with officials at the top of the mountain, the ordeal wasn’t quite over. He said skiing back to the base of the mountain was, “the longest ride I ever had in my life.”

“Actually, I’d been skiing all winter long and you always say to yourself, ‘Wow, I wish these trails were longer.’ No, that day I wish they were shorter.”

Morning Call reporter Peter Hall can be reached at 610-820-6581 or peter.hall@mcall.com. Morning Call reporter Molly Bilinski can be reached at mbilinski@mcall.com.

[Benm]

2 minutes ago, toast21602 said:

 

There was a t-bar in 2017?

I also used to work with Peter, good dude. 

[EdBacon]

1 hour ago, Benm said:

There was a t-bar in 2017?

I also used to work with Peter, good dude. 

I think they are talking about the tubing tow. It's a modified hall tbar.

[RidgeRacer]

and these geniuses are going to manage Blue....

 

"The database shows that one lift at Camelback failed a routine inspection in November 2020 and another lift failed inspections in October and December 2019. Because the database identifies lifts by number and not the name used by the resort, it is unclear whether either lift that failed inspections is the one involved in the fall."

 

Edited June 19, 2021 by RidgeRacer