Wednesday, December 17, 2008

[whistler] gondola tower breaks in two



The pic above is not so clear but the pic in the mind is:

Click pic

There were the skiers enjoying bumper conditions, long queues to get into the gondolas, mucho expenso, when suddenly ... c-r-r-r-r-a-a-a-c-c-k-k! One of the towers breaks in two.

Gondolas are brought to a shuddering halt, swinging around in the breeze then the cable and all sag and bottom out, bouncing a few times, then the realization comes that skiers are stuck up there over the forest way below.

Intrawest, which owns the resort, released a statement last night, saying all 53 guests were evacuated from the gondola shortly before 6 p.m.

You can imagine that operation.

Bryn Hughes, a professional photographer in Whistler, was driving near the Excalibur gondola when he saw the cars start to bounce up and down.

“It was violent for sure,” he said of the yo-yo motion of the cars. “They were going anywhere from 15 to 20 feet down to 15 to 20 feet up.”

Mr. Hughes said he stopped to see whether he could help and saw a young man jump out of one of the cars, which had come to rest about two-and-a-half metres above the ground.

“He was fine. He had a bump on his head and a sore back. He didn't say much, he just wanted to get away from there,” he said.

Mr. Hughes said the top half of a cable tower near the lift station appeared to have sheered off and was lying on the ground.

“It was completely detached, and it was lying near the base [of the tower].”

I've been a few times on a stopped lift but the most frightening of all was the time going down from Mt Pilatus to the town and the gondola, in which I was the only passenger, was swinging sideways and bouncing in a strong wind.

Shudder. Still, it goes with the territory, I suppose.

3 comments:

  1. Thank God nobody was hurt. This sort of thing is just what my wife worries about when we go skiing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's clearly not a major priority but if I can take the T bar or poma up, I usually prefer that. Sometimes one can't.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I often wonder about the cable snapping, but never the tower. I was once got stuck in a small gondola. It was outside of the ski season and so the station wasn't properly maned. It had opened up special for the group I was with, we were left hanging for ages! Because the siren had been sounded at the bottom of the mountain, the people in the town thought we had been involved in an accident.

    ReplyDelete

Comments need a moniker of your choosing before or after ... no moniker, not posted, sorry.