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NORTHERN UTAH -- From Utah resorts to ski hills on the East Coast, people are running into serious problems with chair lifts.
Night skiing was canceled Tuesday night at Brighton Ski Resort due to power problems. The resort also ran into power problems last week -- the same day people had to be roped down from lifts at Solitude Ski Resort when backup generators failed.
Surprisingly, the Utah Department of Transportation bears the responsibility of keeping lifts safe since chairlifts and trams are forms of transportation.
We do not have any concerns on the safety of these lifts.
–UDOT spokesperson Adan Carrillo
UDOT says all lifts are inspected regularly, and what happened at Solitude was a perfect storm of failures.
A fallen tree on Dec. 23 was to blame for the initial power outage at Solitude Ski Resort. That's when the emergency generators were supposed to start.
"The generators did kick in but one had an additional mechanical failure and the other one had a hydraulic failure," said UDOT spokesperson Adan Carrillo.
The result was hundreds of skiers left hanging in the air -- 50 had to be rescued by a pulley system.
Kelli Mezziani was one of those stranded skiers, who called KSL and described the scene: "They are throwing ropes up over the line and they got some little wood chair that people are sitting on and they are lowering them down."
UDOT says the lifts are checked weekly, and a mechanical inspection was performed at Solitude this summer. Both generators passed.
"It is a coincidence," Carrillo said. "It was an incident of bad luck. We're lucky no one got hurt."
That wasn't the case Tuesday, however, at Sugarloaf Ski Resort in Maine when a lift there suddenly broke down. Five chairs fell 25 to 30 feet to the ground, injuring at least eight people.
"We saw people coming down in toboggans, and that was scary," sad lift rider Meghan Lori. "We didn't know what was going on."
When it comes to Utah lifts, UDOT says it's confident in its operations.
"At this point we do not have any concerns on the safety of these lifts," Carrillo stated.
UDOT says power outages happen more often that anyone realizes because the generators kick in and take over.
Brighton expects to be open as usual Wednesday. It's important to note that no one was stranded on their lifts Tuesday due to the power.
E-mail: sdallof@ksl.com
