Salocin

Ski Lifts Crashing to the Ground

I just came back from a weekend in Soelden (or Sölden), a ski resort in Austria. While I was there, an empty gondola crashed to the ground after becoming detached from the cable carrying it up the mountain. I was standing with a couple of friends on the ski slope to one side of the gondola, about 50 meters away, when it wobbled, smacked against the supporting pylon, and then fell off the cable and crashed to the ground below. The AP article referenced above has demonstrated to me how totally misleading the news can be when it's received 3rd hand in this way, it gets most of the facts wrong!

That's a picture of the skilift in question. It's a two-stage lift with cabins that hold a maximum of 8 people in each. The high wind caused some technical problem and the skilift was closed for a very long time, with technicians running around the middle station (the one half-way up the lift where the gondolas slow down and pass through a station to let people get on and off).

We overheard lots of different stories about what caused the problems, and the one story that seemed to make some sense was that the wind had caused some cables to get tangled in the upper half of the lift. This caused the entire thing to be halted as they tried to fix it, and it was standing still (in sub-zero temperatures and howling winds) for about 45 minutes, with lots of people in it (I've heard numbers ranging from 70 to 134). We were walking up a ski slope carrying our skis to get to another skilift and around this broken one when we heard a grinding sound.

One of the gondolas on the far side of the lift (the ones coming down from the top, and therefore empty) was rocking really violently. It was stopped over one of the pylons that hold up the cables, and it looked like someone was throwing it from side to side. Then it came partially unstuck from the cable and turned sideways, I think it smacked into the pylon itself, and then simply toppled from the cable, rotating as it fell. We couldn't see where it hit the ground because it was in a dip, but we certainly heard the crunch of metal hitting ice. At the same time as it fell, we heard a loud noise and saw a cable come whipping out from the middle station, broken. It flew up past the lower cabins, I think it must run through some support in the cabins, and is probably a safety cable or something of the kind. Of course we thought it was the cable holding the cabins up and were almost expecting to see the whole lot come crashing down. We were holding our breath at the time, but although it caused lots of the cabins to rock quite violently, they didn't look like they were going anywhere. The broken cable hanging down between the pylons did make it really clear that they certainly weren't going to be moving any time soon, but the cable that supports all the cabins was still intact, and the fallen gondola had somehow become unattached from that cable.

This was the end of the dramatics from our point of view, although I can't even begin to imagine how absolutely terrified the passengers stuck up there in the cabins must have been, having seen a cabin nearby fall 20 meters to the ground below. We had to get off the mountain because it was so cold and windy we couldn't feel our faces or fingers anymore.

From the bottom, we saw a helicopter try to dangle a person near one of the cabins, but the winds made it impossible, and they gave up on that after a while. I think it was incredibly risky to have tried it in the first place. I didn't even know helicopters could fly in gales like that, and the poor rescuer dangling from a line below it was being thrown about like a cocktail shaker.

Eventually, we heard on the radio in Germany that it took many hours to bring the people down, and that they did it by rapelling from the cabins to the ground (wearing harnesses and lowered along ropes). How the rescuers got into the cabins to set up the equipment and put everyone in harnesses is anybody's guess, maybe they had to shimmy down the cables to the cabins after climbing the pylons. Thank goodness there are people prepared to do things like that.

The final result is - one downed cabin, nobody killed, a few people with hypothermia from being in the cabins for so long, some very very scared individuals and pretty bad PR for Soelden ski resort. Last I checked, the skilift was still out of action, although I expect it will take several days, if not weeks, to repair. They may also want an enquiry into how something so awful could have happened: people sometimes go down in gondolas when they don't like the weather at the top or when they don't want to ski down for other reasons. There could have been someone in that gondola when it went crashing to the ground.

I would also like to thank my procrastinating Italian friend, who made us wait as he copied photos from one computer to another. Had he not delayed us, we would have been trapped in those gondolas too.

Another observation : When I saw the gondola fall down, I had 2 reactions. The first was denial: I use these things all the time and it's necessary for me to feel safe in them, I also never anticipated that they could actually fall off the cable. The second was ... nothing. It took me about 2 hours to actually get an emotional reaction to what had happened. I felt like I was watching a movie. I think that by seeing extreme stuff on television all the time, by constantly getting bombarded by the worst news in the world, and hearing all the time about disasters, when we see one for real, we're not impressed. It's wrong, we should be impressed. I should have been utterly appalled by what I was seeing from the very moment it happened. Apart from checking with a few people to make sure that they too believed the gondola to be empty (otherwise we would have had to go and check), I just stood there for 5 minutes, and then got moving when I realised I couldn't feel my fingers.

I expect that this comes from having seen too many disaster movies and documentaries about "what went wrong", and also from the fact that there really wasn't anything we could do to help - they were 20-40 metres up, dangling from a cable, and we were in sub-zero gale force winds on the ground. Nevertheless - it's disturbing. I'm still happy my reaction was one of being a bit stunned. Some of the people around us got out their cameras and started taking pictures almost immediately, which seemed kind of sick to me.

Posted by nlvp at November 15, 2004 04:32 PM