“Every year you have to adapt to new laws and cases,” says Jan Evans, risk manager for Big Bear Mountain Resorts (Bear Mountain and Snow Summit), Calif. “It ‘s not easy to stay current. You have to stay in close contact with your lawyer, and pay attention to the information available from the various legal services that report on new laws and precedents.”
Plus, says Snow Summit on-site risk manager Steve Hanft, “Experience in what happens from season to season helps you constantly refine your procedures—it helps you determine what kind of info you can obtain, and need to obtain.” All this information must be assimilated into the resort’s procedures and communicated to all affected employees.
Because there’s always something new to consider or incorporate, SAM spoke with Evans and Hanft about how the area currently handles accident investigations.
The Importance of Training
To make employees familiar with state and case law, the Big Bear areas consult with their attorneys on developing the protocols and policies the area will follow. It takes training to recognize when things might escalate. “On an annual basis, we do an investigation refresher course with our attorney and our level three patrollers,” says Hanft. This also makes patrollers more comfortable about communicating with the attorney in the future, he adds.
But training doesn’t stop with the top patrollers. “We train all of our staff, including first-year patrollers, to recognize the elements that might require investigation beyond filling out an accident report,” Hanft says.
The Big Bear terrain park staffs also receive training directly from the attorney and the patrol. “Our terrain park staff loves to hear directly from the guy who has to use their information in court. It carries more weight than having management talk about these issues,” Hanft adds.
Stepping Through the Process
Typically, the incident investigation team consists of the risk manager and safety director. It may also include the general manager or mountain manager (who will be included if there are potential liability issues) as well as others who are brought into an investigation if it involves their department or area of expertise. These managers oversee the work of the employees who do most of the work in the field—the ski patrol.
“The basic procedures are pretty much the same from resort to resort,” says Hanft. “It starts with a reported incident. The patrol responds and renders first aid. Our staff, as with most resorts, have protocols they follow. They determine the point of impact, point of rest, path of approach and other details.” The report can include written comments, diagrams and photos (digital or film), among other items.
“The shift or patrol leader gets that report almost immediately. We assign our highest-level patrollers to that task. They review the reports to make sure they are complete,” Hanft says.
“All incidents are reviewed [by the risk manager] within 24 to 48 hours for accuracy and completeness,” adds Evans. “Each incident needs different types of information depending on the type of incident. For example, the needs for a terrain park incident are different from a snowmobile incident. Management needs to look at the incident to fill any holes in the information.” Evans adds that it’s important for the review to include persons “who are familiar with the case law in that area.”
When Really Bad things Happen
Of course, several types of incidents require more than a basic patrol report. Those fall into eight categories that up the ante, says Hanft. “If an injured person is in a winter sports class, that triggers more reporting; there’s a release involved. Rental equipment, same thing. Lift-related incidents also trigger other steps, as do collisions with others or with stationary objects or incidents involving company-owned vehicles,” he says.
The seriousness of injury also ups the criteria for how far the area takes the investigation. Injuries that could lead to temporary or possibly permanent loss of function, being out of work, involve a high cost of care are investigated to a greater level. In general the greater the cost and inconvenience to an injured guest, the more detail and attention the case gets. Often, theses cases involve the relevant department heads.
These judgments, typically, “aren’t rocket science,” Hanft says. For example, a knee injury by itself doesn’t trigger an investigation beyond a patrol report unless other factors are involved—the injured person was on rental gear, in a class, or on a lift ramp, perhaps. “Every incident is different, and you have to recognize which incidents can go sideways on you,” says Hanft.
If an injury takes place during a ski/ride school class, Snow Summit adds a report from the instructor and tries to identify potential witnesses from the class roster, and takes statements. If rental gear is involved, the investigation team collects the rental agreement and liability release, makes sure the gear is inspected, and the results are entered into the report.
When an incident occurs at a lift terminal, the team talks to the employees at that station, gets statements, obtains diagrams of what happened, documents where the lift operators were and how they reacted, and seeks out witness statements.
Often, department heads or other managers get involved during this process. For example, Snow Summit has a liaison with the winter sports school who helps conduct the employee interview. For lift incidents, typically the supervisor or assistant supervisor meets with patrol staff and the involved employees.
“We think it’s important to have the supervisor involved with the employee while doing the report because that provides feedback on training issues. Plus they may think of other operating details that the patrol wouldn’t,” says Hanft.
The attitude of the guests also figures into the equation. If they are placing blame or acting angry and making threats, then the investigation may expand.
It’s the exceptions that require the most attention. “In the case of a serious accident, the investigation has to be kicked upstairs almost immediately,” says Evans. “Then it’s time to get the attorneys involved as quickly as possible. The classic problems occur when the attorney isn’t brought in right away and no one reviews the incident report thoroughly.”
A good investigation can also help in another area: spin control. An accident can trigger adverse publicity, even in cases where the resort was not at fault. Having the facts on hand can often defuse the situation. “Regardless of your [liability] exposure, it’s your business that gets splashed all over the media,” says Evans. “I don’t mean to insult any insurance company, but they don’t have your interests at heart the way you do. You’re the one who has to protect your business reputation.”
Of course, everyone involved in risk management emphasizes that the goal of the investigation is to determine, as clearly as possible, precisely what happened—to be accurate and honest. That helps everyone involved understand their liability exposure, if any.
Knowing the details can also help reduce future incidents. “From a safety point of view, you want to know exactly what happened so that you can prevent it from recurring,” says Evans.
Witnesses for the Defense
In gathering the facts, obtaining eye-witness accounts is a big plus. But it’s easier said than done. Even identifying witnesses at the time of the incident can be tricky.
The first step is to get positive IDs on all parties. The second is obtaining witness statements, “which often takes extraordinary people-handling skills on the part of patrollers, parking staff, terrain park staff, and so on. Just about all employees need training on that,” says Hanft.
“We train staff to get complete information, like a statement or interview, but we’ll settle for getting name/ address/phone number and assurance we can contact them later. Some guests might be willing to cooperate, but don’t want to take time from the ski day. Sometimes you have to settle for less to keep them cooperative. Of course, sometimes they won’t cooperate at all—that’s just the way it is.”
And sometimes you get more information than you expect. “One thing we got out of the blue came up during a single-skier-error incident, in which a guy collided with a [stationary object]. A witness who saw [the incident] from a chairlift got in touch with us and volunteered that he saw it develop even before it happened.” The witness described how the skier lost control a great distance from the actual point of the incident. “That information clued us into the fact that we should routinely see what chairlifts might have sight of an incident, so that we can get patrollers to ask at the top of lifts and find witnesses,” says Hanft.
“We try to determine not just the point of impact, but the onset of the problem—it could have been a couple hundred yards prior to the incident, and other witnesses might have seen it. You just have to know where to look for the witnesses,” he says. In some cases, witnesses may include persons who had contact with an individual hours before an incident took place—“anyone who has spent time with the victim,” says Evans.
Relevant information can come from several other sources as well: marketing, the website, web cam, weather reports, lift logs, grooming and snowmaking logs. This information can complement the specifics of an incident. There are lots of info sources, and the more serious the incident, the more important these sources can be.
All this makes accident investigation a matter of both by-the-book fact gathering and finding creative ways to sleuth out all the relevant information. It’s not a matter of simply following a protocol, but rather understanding that the end goal is to assemble an accurate picture of what happened. There’s a good detective inside every successful risk manager.
The Digital Revolution
One of the more useful tools in accident investigation is a good, clear diagram of a scene. But a hand-drawn diagram, done with cold fingers in inclement weather, may not present a very good impression in court. That’s where a crisp, digital map can come in handy.
Keystone has put its area-wide GPS map to precisely this use. The resort has mapped the boundary of every trail and the locations of very sign, lift tower and snowmaking hydrant. This allows the resort to pinpoint the exact location of an incident and to map it, start to finish, on the computer. The result is a highly accurate and professional-looking presentation, and one that is easy to duplicate.
“All we want to do is preserve the facts and present them in a way people can understand,” says Keystone mountain manager Chuck Tolton. “And this says we take this as seriously as we can. You never know what piece of evidence will ring true with jurors. They may not know skiing, but may be familiar with mapping. If so, then this helps them better understand the incident. And it can be a management tool to determine if management should do something differently—procedures, signage, etc.”
Digital photography can supplement the computer-generated diagrams; with the Keystone system, staff can draw right on the images once they are loaded onto the computer—it’s a fast and accurate way to document an incident. “It takes the issue of artistic interpretation out of the equation,” Tolton says. “Plus, we can get photos to lawyers and insurance brokers within an hour of the accident.”
Accident investigation is just one of many uses to which Keystone puts its computerized mapping system. “We use it for all kinds of planning applications,” says Tolton. “We just changed our acreage measure based on this system. We’re also using it to locate water and electrical lines. Last spring we did a map for Next Snow Search to lay out fencing, patroller locations, etc. After Colorado passed its new skier safety legislation, we were able to go out and measure to see if we have any areas that meet the definition for extreme terrain. It just so happens that accident investigation is part of this much bigger program.”
For all these benefits, the Keystone program caught the attention of other areas when it was presented at the Rocky Mountain Lift Association meeting last May. “For practical reasons, this is the direction accident investigation has to go,” says Snow Summit’s Steve Hanft. “Detailed investigations are very time-consuming. It takes a lot of time to collect photos, draw diagrams, etc. Speeding that up saves time and labor. That’s significant.”
—RK
Maintaining the Corporate Memory
Accident investigation is your corporate memory, so it’s important to safeguard your records so that the information can be easily accessed when it is needed. And that is often several years later.
This is where areas sometimes come up short. Information might be stored haphazardly, in old, poorly-marked boxes in out-of-the-way buildings. As a result, it can get damaged by water or animals, lost to fire or thrown out at purge time. The solution? File your records in a way that makes them easy to retrieve. The records themselves should be stored in a fireproof file cabinet, in a protected building, preferably one that’s used year-round, or in a secure storage area (either onsite or off).
To maintain records securely requires a clear chain of possession, with one person in charge and responsible. And there must be a clear line of succession. How will new personnel find info? Who will train the newcomers? How do you pass the baton on record-keeping and filing? Make sure procedures are written down and kept in a prominent place.
—RK
