CARRABASSETT VALLEY — Hank Margolis drives up from Marlborough, Mass., every weekend in the winter to ski at Sugarloaf. On Saturday, a beautiful, crowded day on the slopes, he’d made it 500 feet up the King Pine lift, headed to the top for a run on his snowboard, when it suddenly stopped.
Margolis and three strangers on the seat next to him dangled 50 feet up in the air.
“The harrowing part was it started to accelerate backwards, which lifts do not do, ever,” said Margolis, 56.
He told his seat mates, less-experienced skiers, to ditch their gear — they were probably going to have to jump.
“It was raining skis and snowboards; people were screaming,” he said. “People were trying to get out of the way of the next people coming to jump; it was absolute bedlam.”
Seven people were injured and more than 200 were stuck on the King Pine lift for up to two hours Saturday after it experienced what mountain officials referred to as a “rollback.”
Sugarloaf spokesman Ethan Austin said the lift traveled backward the distance of nine chairs, about 450 feet, but did not “de-rope.”
Four people were taken to Franklin Memorial Hospital by ambulance. A hospital spokeswoman said three had noncritical injuries and were in stable condition in the afternoon. The condition of the fourth was unclear, though that person may have been treated and released.
The mountain was in the early stages of investigating what went wrong, Austin said. An inspector from the State of Maine Board of Elevator and Tramway Safety was on site in the afternoon.
The accident happened at 11:34 a.m. The King Pine lift is a short, mid-mountain lift near the edge of the resort property. According to Sugarloaf officials, it was built in 1988 and is 3,400 feet long with 122 chairs. It moves at the speed of 450 feet per minute.
In addition to annual state inspections, it also receives daily inspections and weekly, monthly and yearly maintenance and testing.
According to Austin, an early-morning inspection on Saturday by maintenance staff had shown no irregularities.
Greg Hoffmeister, 44, of Needham, Mass., was on the lift with his 12-year-old daughter, two-thirds of the way to the top, when they felt the lift make a fairly routine stop, like “someone was having trouble getting on.”
“Instead of the usual stay-in-place stop, it stopped but then immediately started going back in reverse,” he said. “You start thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, something’s happening; it’s not supposed to happen.’ It was just scary.”
Hoffmeister and his daughter jumped off when the lift stopped and they found themselves 10 feet off the ground. He checked on his wife and two daughters two seats behind them and skied to the bottom where they saw the ski patrol stabilizing victims.
“I was told the chairs were whipping around that U-turn (the bullwheel where skiers typically get on) in reverse and swinging out almost 90 degrees up,” he said. “That’s where people were getting thrown off. I think some people hit poles, chairlifts were swinging and hitting other chairlifts and it was just a nightmare down there.”
Margolis said his group faced the split-second “terrifying” decision of whether to stay in their seat and risk hitting the bullwheel at the bottom of the lift or jumping and were relieved when they stopped 150 feet from the bottom. He saw people on the ground, unresponsive and sent out a number of photos on social media in the hours following.
The ski patrol spent almost two hours removing 204 people stuck on the lift. They tossed up ropes and a seat and belayed the guests down.
“You put the harness around your shoulders, under your arms, and you put the seat between your legs and you take a deep breath and you push off the chair and they lower you to the ground,” Margolis said. “They did a really remarkable job. The ski patrol was phenomenal in their response. They clearly had practiced it; it seemed like it was second nature to them.”
No guests were injured during the lift evacuation process and no staff were injured in the accident, Austin said.
“We will work closely with the tramway board to figure out what happened,” Austin said. “Our first priority today is making sure everyone is safe.”
The King Pine lift will remain closed until further notice, he said.
Saturday’s incident was the second at Sugarloaf in about four and a half years.
On Dec. 28, 2010, several people were injured when a cable on the Spillway East chairlift broke and sent five chairs tumbling to the ground. Dozens of skiers were helped off the lift in that incident, as well. A lawsuit from that accident is still awaiting a trial date.
On Saturday, after their experience, Hoffmeister said his daughters decided to head back to the condominium and watch TV.
“My 10-year-old daughter, who is fearless, nothing scares her, she was rattled,” he said. But he and his wife were right back on the slopes.
It was the same for Margolis, who was “very, very grateful” the day didn’t end worse.
“I was on a lift 15 minutes after I was evacuated,” he said. “I wanted to get that over with.”
As it happened, he rode up on a lift with his wife, a friend and a fourth man who’d also been stuck on King Pine. “He did exactly what I did, except he’d stopped at the bar and gotten a beer first. He wanted to get right back on the chair, too,” Margolis said.
kskelton@sunjournal.com
Staff writer Donna Perry contributed to this report.
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