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Chair incident


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Sweaty engineering time

Ok so Camelback has been open since 1963 and, although a chair apparently fell off the bullwheel once, only 3 people have fallen off of a chair.  Camelback does not share skier visit #s though so you can't get a percent there

If we consider only Sullivan, it has been running since 1995 year round with 66 chairs and a 3.1min bottom to top time according to liftblog.  Since 1995 66 chairs/6min round trip * more or less 5 full months worth of operating after considering both winter and occasional summer operation * 30 days/month * 12 hours/day * 60min/hour is 1,188,000 trips and only 1 chair has fallen off.

This gives literally somewhere on the order of 1 in a million chance even on Sullivan.

If there are about 2,500 ski lifts in the US, and at least as many no longer exist, and less than a dozen chairs or so have ever fallen off of a list in the US with people on them (mostly Yan detachables), this gives odds on the order of 1 in 500 million that a chair will fall off in any given trip

or about 0.000000001% chance

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Right. A friend's KIA drove for 5 years with zero issues. It must drive for the following 5 years with no issues too. Or not, as it's a KIA.

My Honda's GPS was syncing radio's time with satellites for 16 years. It must be doing it even now. Oh wait, there was a GPS week rollover bug, so all of a sudden it no longer works since Feb 2020.

Whatever you do tomorrow, don't board chair 62. Or 63 because that's the next one to detach.

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Yeah stats probability not the best way to consider the risk of riding camelback lifts currently but a good general idea of how risky it is to ride a random chairlift.

I would be very interested in seeing the results of the investigation and am interested to see what they do with sullivan lift, if doppelmayer says any thing about it, or if Camelback is determined to be at fault for bad maintenance or the bouncing issue.  But it does seem like this could very well be a fluke accident - lots of chairs bounce around quite a bit when they are stopped/started suddenly.

Sullivan lift definitely very sketch since if it did it once it could do it again.  It is just sitting there menacingly on the webcam. Stevenson quad also kind of sketch since it is apparently very similar, definitely will be thinking about this if I am riding it tomorrow, but from what people are saying stevenson never really bounced like people said Sullivan and been doing.  At any rate, the risk driving in the car or of crashing/being hit by someone skiing is surely far more dangerous than riding the lifts at Camelback even now (really knocking on wood here as I write this).

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Speaking of risk, I rode the Collings Foundation B-17 on 8/20/19. It crashed only about 6 weeks or 43 days later and 7 of 13 people on board were killed.

Now that was a close call... but I don't really think in terms of "it could have been me" because I wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time. Though I doubt I will ever fly on a vintage WWII plane ever again.

Edited by saltyant
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1 hour ago, abe said:

Sweaty engineering time

Ok so Camelback has been open since 1963 and, although a chair apparently fell off the bullwheel once, only 3 people have fallen off of a chair.  Camelback does not share skier visit #s though so you can't get a percent there

If we consider only Sullivan, it has been running since 1995 year round with 66 chairs and a 3.1min bottom to top time according to liftblog.  Since 1995 66 chairs/6min round trip * more or less 5 full months worth of operating after considering both winter and occasional summer operation * 30 days/month * 12 hours/day * 60min/hour is 1,188,000 trips and only 1 chair has fallen off.

This gives literally somewhere on the order of 1 in a million chance even on Sullivan.

If there are about 2,500 ski lifts in the US, and at least as many no longer exist, and less than a dozen chairs or so have ever fallen off of a list in the US with people on them (mostly Yan detachables), this gives odds on the order of 1 in 500 million that a chair will fall off in any given trip

or about 0.000000001% chance

You added to many zeros. 

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On 4/6/2021 at 7:31 PM, toast21602 said:

Have there been any updates about this?

It was brought up in a Colorado tram board meeting last week. Engineer said it is being investigated as a dynamic event caused by multiple speed changes. Similarities to the Granby Ranch incident a few years ago. Colorado is looking at putting a mandatory delay in between speed ups/restarts.

Edited by Lift Blog
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