liftmech has some very good points, I have posted my reply in the industry section.
Here is an article on Breckenridges' training.
Breckenridge Training
By Nicole Formosa
summit daily news
November 8, 2005
BRECKENRIDGE - It's one of the worst scenarios a ski area could fathom - a popular chairlift derails on a busy day, sending dozens of skiers and snowboarders crashing to the ground 30 or more feet below. Some victims are dead, some critically injured, others are frantic.
While nothing of that scale has ever occurred at Breckenridge Ski Resort, the resort's ski patrol and the Breckenridge Medical Center want to be prepared just in case a mass casualty incident takes place on or off the slopes.
"Things like a possible explosion at a restaurant, a fire ... obviously a catastrophic lift failure at a ski area might have the greatest chance of mass casualty," said Sam Truesdell, an emergency medical technician with Breckenridge Medical Center and Breckenridge Ski Patrol.
The two entities teamed up with Summit County Ambulance, the Red, White and Blue Fire Department, the Summit County Sheriff's Office, the Breckenridge Police Department, Summit Rescue Group and other local emergency agencies to stage a chairlift derailment at Peak 9's Quicksilver Lift Tuesday.
"The potential for something like this to happen is there," said second-year ski patroller Jaime Benthin. "The amount of people skiing here and all the cool stuff to do in Summit County - it's a pretty darn good idea to practice," Benthin said, adding that her first concern working at the resort is an inbounds avalanche.
The drill began at 9 a.m. as 20 volunteer victims from ski patrol and a Colorado Mountain College EMT class positioned themselves under the quad's chairs between towers two and four.
The victims pretended to be suffering from a range of ailments, from a ski pole through the neck to back and chest injuries to amputations and fatalities.
An emergency worker from St. Anthony Hospitals prepped the patients with a red dye solution to simulate blood and adorned a handful of victims with fake appendages with gaping wounds.
A teams of ski patrollers acted as first responders, assessing the situation, stabilizing the patients and moving them to the medical center.
"It's good exposure," said Breckenridge Ski Patrol trainer Julie Tierney. "We learn a lot from our drills."
Other volunteers milled around the scene acting as concerned family members. Some were instructed to call the medical center and the ski area asking what happened in order to overload the phone lines, as would likely happen in a real disaster.
At the same time, fire trucks, ambulances and police cars quickly filled the Beaver Run parking lot.
Like any emergency scene, the occasional onlooker paused to see what all the fuss was about.
"I thought maybe something happened because the paper I read this morning said there were possible avalanches and those types of things," said Pat Patrick, an Illinois resident staying at the Great Divide Lodge while celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary.
The medical center and ski patrol trained with a similar exercise about five years ago. The training is different from those held by the county's incident management team, which staged a hazardous materials emergency last year at the high school.
The most catastrophic accidents at Breckenridge since it opened in 1961 were a gas explosion in the Ullr building in 1966 that killed one person and an avalanche on Peak 7 in February of 1987 that killed four people. That avalanche was not inside the ski area boundary.
http://www.summitdaily.com/article/2005110...ION01/111080038
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