Ten people have been injured after skiers and snowboarders were evacuated Tuesday from gondolas that tumbled when a support tower at 2010 Olympic site Whistler/Blackcomb snapped in half.
None of the injuries are believed to be life threatening, said Whistler RCMP Sgt. Steve Wright.
More than 50 stranded skiers and snowboarders at the popular ski resort were rescued. The evacuation took several hours on one of the coldest days so far this winter.
The accident happened on the Excalibur Gondola, which carries skiers to the top of Blackcomb Mountain from Whistler Village, which is co-hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics along with Vancouver.
The organizing committee for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics is not planning on using the Excalibur as transportation to or from any Olympic venues, said spokeswoman Renee Smith-Valade.
In an interview shortly after being rescued, snowboarder Logan Swayze said when his gondola car stopped abruptly passengers "didn’t think anything of it at first. . . . But the time drew on." Only after he made a phone call to a friend did he learn that a tower had collapsed.
After an hour’s wait, Swayze’s car was moved slowly to the base, where he saw fire and ambulance crews stretching ladders to the cars to bring skiers to the ground.
"We saw a lift tower had broken in half and the gondola was hanging. There were still people in the bottom half" of the gondola, he said.
There was a delay before anyone could be taken off as rescue workers had to secure the fallen tower, said Doug Forseth, a spokesman with Whistler/Blackcomb.
Forseth said no one yet knows why the tower snapped.
None of the gondola cars came off the cable. One of the cars came to rest on a bus shelter, and fire officials using a fire truck’s hydraulic ladder began unloading the passengers from that one first.
In all, 15 to 20 cars on the lower base of the gondola were stranded. The cars hold a maximum of eight passengers each, but were not full, officials said.
The injuries reported were "minor," said Michelle Leroux, spokeswoman for the Doppelmayr/Garaventa Group, the company that built the Excalibur Gondola.
Leroux said she was not aware of any accidents on the Excalibur since its installation in 1994. The Excalibur is tested by the B.C. Safety Authority every year and passed its most recent test this fall, she said.
Eighty per cent of the high speed chairs and gondolas on Whistler and Blackcomb have been designed and built by Doppelmayr, including the new Peak 2 Peak gondola between Whistler and Blackcomb.
Lara Christensen, one of five people suspended in a car during the incident, said that when the tower collapsed, "all of a sudden there was a really big jolt." She said the car was moving a lot and the cables were bouncing "like crazy."
Whistler resident Corey Gagnon said just minutes after getting off the Excalibur Gondola that he saw one of the cars "swinging violently" on the cable.
In 2002, a five-year-old girl fell about 11 metres from the Creekside Gondola at Whistler when a latch malfunctioned and the car door opened. Soft snow cushioned her fall and she survived.
The gondola was installed in 1996 to replace the Quicksilver Express, after an accident in December 1995 in which two people died and eight were injured when four chairs fell four storeys to the ground.
© Canwest News Service 2008
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