CARRABASSETT VALLEY, Maine — The King Pine chairlift at Sugarloaf Mountain remained closed Sunday while officials from the state's Board of Elevator and Tramway Safety investigated an accident that injured seven skiers and snowboarders Saturday.
The ski resort's other lifts are expected to open when weather allows, including one that is the same make and model as the one that failed.
For a frightening 20 seconds, the King Pine lift spooled backwards and skiers and snowboarders were in virtual freefall.
Hank Margolis is a salesman from Marlboro, Massachusetts, who confidently snowboards and skis Sugarloaf every weekend he can. But on Saturday at roughly 11:30 a.m., as he rode up on the packed four-person chair on the mountain's east side, the lift abruptly stopped. Then it began to move the wrong way, and people started screaming.
"It was horrifying," Margolis says. "It was like being on a zipline, but completely out of control. And I realized that there's a couple hundred people ahead of me, thousands of pounds of weight, all propelling the lift backwards and apparently no way to stop it."
Resort officials say the lift's cable rolled back 460 feet — nine chairs worth. Margolis' chair stopped before going back through the bottom of the lift. But not everyone had that luck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jys_iGDpfw8
"People were starting to jump off," Margolis says. "There's a bullwheel — a pulley at the bottom of the lift — and people were being propelled down toward that pulley and people were trying to jump off and get off that before they spun around. The people that were not fortunate enough to get off got ejected from their chairs going backwards and it looked like two of the people in that situation were severely injured. They were nonresponsive and laying on the ground."
At least one chair smashed into a lift tower, according to multiple witnesses. A resort spokesman says none of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening. Four were transported to the nearest hospital.
Some 200 others, including Margolis, were stranded above the snow for as long as two hours before resort staffers were able to bring them down with ropes and harnesses.
Resort spokesman Ethan Austin says the lift that failed yesterday, constructed in 1988, was inspected the morning of the accident. He says all the resort's lifts are inspected daily.
"Safety is our absolute first concern in everything that we do," Austin says. "We want our guests to enjoy our mountain. We want them to be confident that they can do it safely so ensuring that they continue to have that faith in us is paramount to our operation."
This is not the first chairlift accident at Sugarloaf. In 2010, part of another lift went down, injuring eight, including one man who suffered a broken back and brain trauma.
