0
Blogging Polar
Well it's been two weeks since March 2, 2007, a day permanently etched on my brain, the day Polar Express went down for the entire afternoon. I have been agonizing on how to best address all of you regarding the cumulative effects of the day and the connected actions (or non-actions) of the 3(+/-) hr ordeal.
After writing pages and pages, I have come to the conclusion that the best thing I can do is communicate why it happened and what we are going to do to avoid such incidents in the future. The initial failure of the lift going down was somewhat of a fluke – a simple procedure that went awry. That's one thing, but the chain of unfortunate circumstances that followed, well, bottom line - there are just not enough words to effectively communicate how we failed you. The number of "should haves" and "why didn’t we" is just plain unacceptable - we could have, and should have been better prepared to respond, and for that I owe all of those impacted by the incident a sincere apology and a "Thank You" for your patience through it all.
Since the events of that afternoon we have been very focused on ensuring that we do everything in our power to not have a repeat. We have held several debriefing meetings to assess our successes and failures of the day and action plans for the future. In attendance were the Lift Maintenance Director, Patrol Director, Lift Operations Manager, the Mountain Manager and Guest Services Director. We spent much of the time analyzing our errors and lack of effective communication. As a result - prevention, of course, is our highest priority. Immediately followed by a quicker reaction time to get to resolution, and improved communications to keep our guests apprized of the situation. Once again, I am truly sorry for the inconveniences we created and the heart ache we caused all those directly and indirectly affected, I'm confident we have covered and addressed every item that we can control and will be better prepared to respond the "next time". I wish I could guarantee that the lift will never go down, but I know that would be foolish, and time will tell if our efforts to improve will be successful.
Lift performance and lift down time have always been top of mind for me, we track it and chart it, and believe it or not we are always strategizing on how to reduce it. We track separately the operational downtime, mechanical downtime, electrical down time as well as the uncontrollable conditions of wind and my personal favorite, PG&E. Below is a brief summary of one of our tracking matrixes. This matrix does not include stop time for a mis-load/unload and has about a 10% margin of error. We use this information to better train our staff, upgrade our lift components, set part replacement schedules and establish service and maintenance schedules. I will let the numbers speak for themselves, but this chart compares the total for all last season to the beginning of this season to March 3rd.
As a result of the debriefing sessions, Poma is coming next week to further access the situation, train and retrain our maintenance staff and render some assistance on several nagging mechanical and electrical problems. In order to do this we need to bring the lift down and out of service for a day. So on Tuesday, March 20 Polar will be closed and Pooh will be operating for the day. Not sure yet on how to record this non operating day in the matrix.
Changing the subject - something else near and dear to all of our hearts - the LOWER MOUNTAIN - Just putting you all on notice - without a drop in temps or new snow Griz is not long for this world/season. I can't say how long exactly but it will most likely close before April 15 without a change in the weather. Get your runs in now - and let's hope for some new snow. The natives tell me, that just when we start thinking spring is here - we get a nice dumping! Would love to see it!
Cheers - Genling
Attached File(s)
-
liftdownchart_785695.jpg (152.08K)
Number of downloads: 51
