9 replies to this topic

[JohnRW]

We had a bit of a storm this week. Freezing rain starting Monday night / Tuesday morning meant we couldn't get up the road all week. We're upgrading our power service at one of the lifts, and had everything set for Tuesday, until the freezing rain happened.

Then on December 30, our weather station hit 116 mph, then the anemometer blew away. They don't name these storms in AK, or even call them hurricanes. They're generally referred to as "last week's storm".
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It started snowing on Thursday morning, and enough fell to cover up the worst of the ice, so I went up to check out the damage. First thing I noticed is we didn't have full power. We lost a phase in the wind storm, so the fridge and freezer were 50 degrees, the lights were intermittent, and all the rest of the electrical was acting weird. You can see the connection to the lost phase dangling off the power pole.
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Called the utility company, and they started up the hill in a bucket truck. Their truck found an icy spot my car had missed and ended up in the ditch. A sand truck they called to help ended up sliding into the bucket truck later on Thursday evening. They didn't get the vehicles off the hill until 6pm New Year's Eve. They finally fixed the power about 2pm Friday.
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After raising the alarm about the power, it was time to check out the lifts. Chair 1 seemed fine - the comm line wasn't caught on a chair pin (Riblet lifts - this happens a couple times a year in high winds). Chair 2 though ... something looks wrong here. Between the first and second towers in the photo, you can see the comm line sagging way below the haul rope. Looks like a chair flipped around and pulled on the comm line. It pulled some line down from the tower above, and ripped out a few connections in the full splice at that tower. We spent all afternoon today (after the winds died down, because another front blew in last night) re-tensioning and re-splicing the line. Guess I should be lucky it didn't de-rope those two towers, like 4 years ago when we had a 122 mph wind storm.
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Looks like we're ready to open tomorrow - except now it's raining in town and we have a 50/50 chance the road will be glare ice again.

2016 is off to a great start!

This post has been edited by JohnRW: 01 January 2016 - 10:44 PM

[SkiLiftsRock]

Happy New Year!

My resort closed at 10:00am when the utility company lost 1 phase and the other phase was a brown out. The entire area was without power for 5 hours. Lots of fun running APU's to evacuate all the passengers.

[RibStaThiok]

That's a beautiful old center pole riblet.. What resort are you at? Please keep us posted. I am glad you are safe. Also the power company has an awesome international pole truck there.. just needs a winch to help them get unstuck!

Cheers

[RibStaThiok]

What resort, Skilifts Rock? What kind of APUs do you have?

[SkiLiftsRock]

RibStaThiok, on 02 January 2016 - 07:29 PM, said:

What resort, SkiliftsRock? What kind of APUs do you have?

Homewood Mountain Resort, California. There is a variety of lifts at the resort, and a variety of APU setups. Two lifts have belt drive, where the belt has to be taken off the electric and moved to APU. Another lift has chain drive direct to high speed shaft. The Doppelmayr detach has a standby diesel which will run the lift at near full speed, and also has a separate hydrostatic drive for evacuation. The hydrostatic drive takes around an hour for last chair to reach the top terminal.

[SkiDaBird]

Big Sky has the comm line for Challenger and Headwaters on the ground for certain sections. I'm assuming that's why. Best of luck!

[JohnRW]

RibStaThiok, on 02 January 2016 - 07:27 PM, said:

That's a beautiful old center pole riblet.. What resort are you at? Please keep us posted. I am glad you are safe. Also the power company has an awesome international pole truck there.. just needs a winch to help them get unstuck!

Cheers

Arctic Valley in Anchorage.

1978/9 Riblet. Upgraded electronics a couple years ago - just needs a paint job. We had horrible winds again yesterday, so didn't open. Fingers crossed for today.

They told me it's a brand new truck. Hope they didn't do much damage when the sand truck slid into it!

This post has been edited by JohnRW: 03 January 2016 - 10:24 AM

[JohnRW]

SkiDaBird, on 03 January 2016 - 12:10 AM, said:

Big Sky has the comm line for Challenger and Headwaters on the ground for certain sections. I'm assuming that's why. Best of luck!

Unfortunately it's a newish comm line, and already has two splices in it. I'd love to bury a couple sections, but it's probably not in the cards. We're replacing the comm line on our other Riblet next summer. We will definitely be burying on or two sections there.

[RibStaThiok]

Arctic Valley? That's a volunteer operation isn't it?

[JohnRW]

Mostly. We hire a seasonal maintenance and operations crew, but management and summer maintenance is volunteer. If it ever stops raining in the winter, maybe we can hire a couple folks full time.