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July 2014

Get Me Down!

With summer activities on the rise at mountain resorts, summer lift evacuations are becoming a reality—and they are much different than in winter.

Written by Jimmy Lawrence | 0 comment

It was 3:30 on a lazy Sunday afternoon in August. Tony, the summer operations manager, had just stepped back outside from his office and noticed the triple chair was stopped. Just then he got a call on his cell phone from Curtis on the lift maintenance crew. “The triple has been down for about 15 minutes and it looks like it’s the gear box. We can’t get it running so I think we’ll have to evacuate the lift,” Curtis said.


Tony thought for a moment, running through his mind, who was available to carry out a lift evac today? Tony called the base of the lift and asked the attendant how many people were on it. “We’ve been pretty busy this afternoon. I’ve loaded about every third chair for the past half hour or so,” came the reply. “Quite a few of the people have bikes,” the attendant added.


This won’t be easy, Tony thought, but we should have them off in an hour and a half or so. He made his next call to Janet, his supervisor on duty.


A summer lift evacuation is a scenario that doesn’t happen often, and is most likely unexpected. But ask yourself, how prepared is your summer crew to handle a lift evacuation during a busy weekend?


Yes, at first, it seems like no big deal. You’ve done lift evacs before. It’s a warm sunny day, and you still have a lot of daylight. There are probably only about 50 or 60 people on the lift. What could possibly go wrong?


A lot, actually. Evacuating a lift in the summer is very different, and can be far more complicated, than during the ski season. Let’s look at some of the specific differences and the challenges they entail.


WHO YOU GONNA CALL?
Personnel should be your first concern. Unlike a winter evac, you don’t have a full staff of ski patrol to rely on. If you are lucky, you may have a few patrollers on your summer staff as first aid providers or working a bike operation.


Who else is available? Much of your year-round staff (lift maintenance, summer mountain crew, vehicle mechanics, and administration) may all be off on weekends. Who is available from your summer staff—lift attendants, activity staff (zipline, alpine slide, or other activities), food and beverage, ticket sellers? You will probably need to involve most of these people. How many of them have you trained in lift evacuation procedures?


Time to step back for a minute. Your first mistake may be that you haven’t trained all your summer staff in the lift evac procedure. And you may not have set up a logical phone tree procedure to call in additional employees on their day off, especially those that may be close at hand and can get to the mountain quickly.


So, take a lesson from your winter evac plan, and determine how many people it will take to evacuate your lift in about two hours. Determine the number of teams you will need. Consider that you may have to shut down other activities so you can use those employees. You may need to call in other people to assist, perhaps even an outside company, like local fire or police personnel.


LOGISTICS AND LOCATION
About that two-hour evac window: Your next challenge will undoubtedly be logistics. Your summer challenge mirrors your winter plan in one key way: the mechanics of bringing passengers out of the chair. That process is the same. Even so, make sure an adequate amount of evacuation equipment is available for the worst-case scenario and that it is easily retrievable (i.e., not locked in a room for which no one has the key).


Aside from the actual evac procedure itself, there are far more differences between summer and winter evacs than similarities.


In winter, travel around the mountain is easy. Skis, snowboards, and snowmobiles give you tremendous mobility. In summer, that ability to get from place to place on the mountain—both for your staff and your guests—is severely curtailed. How will your evac teams get to the lift line? What vehicles will be available to drive to the top of the lift? Where is the lift evac equipment stored? Solving these issues at the time of the evacuation is not the ideal approach.


Once evacuees are on the ground, what happens next? In winter, skiers and riders, when lowered from the lift, can ski/ride away. And even if they can’t negotiate the terrain, you can use instructors or hosts to help them get to easier, groomed trails.


In summer, passengers are less mobile, and they may be lowered into rough terrain with bushes, rocks and other debris, so walking out will likely be difficult. And they may not be physically able, or have the proper footwear. You will likely have sightseers who are elderly and not able to hike rough terrain. You will likely have young children who need to be carried. Consider the teenage girls in shorts and flip flops, or the pregnant woman. How will you deal with the passenger who may be physically handicapped? Who will you have available to help these people to areas where they can walk easily or be picked up with vehicles? In planning the number of personnel needed, remember to include people to fulfill these roles.


Speaking of vehicles: consider how many you will need. How many people can your vehicles hold safely? How long will it take to transport evacuees to the base and return for more? Where are the vehicles parked, and where are the keys? Do you have authorized drivers available? These are just a few of the questions that need to be answered.


Remember, too, that you need a plan for retrieving the bikes that are on the lift. Their retrieval won’t happen right away. Determine how you will get them back to their owners, and have a plan to communicate with the passengers on how that will work. Some of these bikes will be very expensive. Don’t make the mistake of returning the bikes to the wrong passengers when they come to retrieve them. Make sure you identify each bike with the appropriate owner as soon as they are lowered from the chair. This is yet another detail your staff on the ground will have to deal with.


PRACTICING A PLAN
All of these issues and questions point to the importance of having a written and practiced plan. Your winter lift evacuation plan won’t suffice. You need to develop a separate summer plan.


In that plan, address your personnel needs, and who from your summer staff will be available to assist with the evacuation. Make sure you outline your training program for the staff. Meet in advance with any outside agencies that you might call upon for assistance. Outline how you will communicate with the stranded passengers. Determine how long it will take for your staff to walk down the line to talk to passengers, and if that will that take more than one person. Include in your plan how you will deal with difficult terrain challenges. If additional equipment will be needed, include that in the plan so that equipment will be available at the time of the evacuation. Remember to plan for both uphill and down-loading passengers. Put in a provision for evacuation practice, and follow through with a yearly drill under summer terrain conditions.


It’s 9:30 that same evening and Tony returns to his office totally exhausted. It seemed so easy when he first thought about it. What could possibly go wrong, he had said.


He started to think about all the things that did go wrong. He didn’t have enough employees on duty, and it took 45 minutes for the people he called on their day off to get to the mountain. He needed more lift evac equipment, and it was locked in the patrol building at the top of the mountain. There were a lot people who couldn’t make it through the bushes and rocks, and he had to send employees in to help them scramble down to a place where they could be picked up. Come to think of it, he could have used a couple more trucks, but the keys were locked in the vehicle shop and he couldn’t get at them.


He didn’t realize how difficult it would be to get passengers off the lift where it passes over the creek. It took a while to get blankets to that woman who lost her balance and ended up in the water. Thank goodness she wasn’t injured.


And how is he going to get the bikes off the lift? He couldn’t believe those two obnoxious guys who wanted their bikes now! He tried to tell them it would take a while. He hoped the bikes will be OK overnight.


He never thought it would be four hours before they got the last person off the lift. He wished he’d been better prepared!