Power outage forces successful chairlift evacuation at Silver Mountain
A view from Chair 4 on Silver Mountain. A power outage on Sunday resulted in the successful evacuation of 60 skiers.
Courtesy photo
KELLOGG –– Skiers enjoying the long weekend at Silver Mountain Ski Resort got a little more thrill than what they signed up for on Sunday when a power outage and mechanical failure resulted in the evacuation of one of the mountain’s chair lifts.
According to a post on the resort’s Facebook page, just before 3 p.m., Chair 4 lost power while carrying several guests. Staff on the mountain quickly decided to utilize the gas-powered backup evacuation motor to handle evacuating the lift, but that motor was only able to operate for approximately 10 minutes before it suffered a mechanical failure.
Silver Mountain called in their highly-trained ski patrol to perform a rope evacuation for the remaining passengers. Rope evacuation on a ski lift is a process where ski patrollers throw a sturdy rope over the lift cable and move from chair to chair to evacuate passengers using harnesses.
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