4 replies to this topic

[Bogong]

It's not just Vail that has had trouble with people 'evacuating' lifts. Yesterday a chair on the Gunbarrel lift at Thredbo in Australia fell 10 metres (about 33 feet) on to soft snow. The only person on the chair suffered light bruising.

The resort gave the reason as ‘a freak gust of wind’, although this is not an isolated incident, a chair also fell from the same lift in 2016.

Gunbarrel is a 31 year old, 1679 metre (a bit over a mile) long, Doppelmayr detachable quad chairlift that climbs 426 metres (1500 feet) from one of the base areas of the mountain to just below the treeline. The authorities have imposed a non disturbance order on the lift while it is investigated.

[Vincen]

Hum will be interesting to know how It fell down ! Grip failure ? chair arm failure ? Wind is not supposed to be enough to detach a chair like that !

[kwoodsparky]

It will if it swung the chair hard enough to hit the tower or miss the trumpet while entering the terminal.

[Vincen]

kwoodsparky, on 23 July 2019 - 06:04 AM, said:

It will if it swung the chair hard enough to hit the tower or miss the trumpet while entering the terminal.

Well the chairlift is not supposed to run in such conditions ! It's right wind can shop up very suddenly but get same issue twice on same lift, it's very very strange !

[Bogong]

An eye witness (who was on the chair behind the one that detached) said that the grip disengaged as it went over the sheaves of a tower. He said that he didn't notice any especially strong wind gust.

This happened at 3,00 on Monday (eastern Australian time). The lift reopened at 11.00 am on Wednesday with no report from investigators and the resort still claiming the chairlift detached due to 'a freak gust of wind'. That seems increasingly dubious as there are dozens of detachable grip chairlifts in Australia that are far more exposed to wind and weather than this one and they have never dropped chairs.