 |
|
|
|
To submit a news item send an email to press@mountainnews.com. The Industry Report is published by Mountain News Corp., which also publishes OnTheSnow.com Editor-In-Chief: - Craig Altschul Executive Editor: - Roger Leo President & Publisher: - Rob Brown Managing Director: - Chad Dyer Advertising Information: - sales@mountainnews.com Subscriptions:
Archives: - September 2009 - August 2009 - July 2009 - June 2009 - May 2009 - April 2009 - March 2009 - February 2009 - January 2009 - December 2008 - November 2008 - October 2008 Recent Posts: |
|
|
« Previous Story | The Industry Report Home Page | Next Story » Mountain Managers Wrap Their Heads Around DisasterBy J.D. O'Connor  Talk about your nightmare jobs. Take a thousand-plus acres of mountain, throw in a trembling shelf of ice, a crowning forest fire or stalled chairlift, add the daily presence of upwards of six thousand human beings acutely vulnerable to any of these pending catastrophes and come up with a plan to save them. Then, just to make it really fun, throw in the potential of a biological attack on the town water supply, a natural gas explosion at a local bank (Crested Butte, 1991), plane crash (Sugar Bowl, 2005), or an arson fire allegedly set by eco-terrorists (Vail, 1998), and you've got the job description that keeps guys like Aspen's Steve Sewell up nights. "As much as you hate to think about that stuff, you have to be prepared to deal with it when it happens," Sewell, mountain manager at Aspen Skiing Company, told Industry Report. "And we spend a great deal of time coming up with ways to deal with it." Call it what you like - Mountain Disaster Planning, Emergency Preparedness, All-Hazard Mitigation - it all boils down to planning for the day chaos comes to your mountain. Sewell and other mountain managers who spoke with IR said resort planning has taken on an entirely new dimension in a post-9/11/Katrina world. "We're required to have lift evacuation procedures in place, avalanche rescue training, everything you'd expect us to have, and we have a leg up on all that because we've done it," Sewell said. "But now you also have to plan for the unexpected, knowing you're damn lucky if that plan goes the way you thought it would when the unexpected finally happens." Sewell and his colleagues drill constantly, they say, most commonly putting long hours of practice into use by mounting search operations for errant skiers or digging out avalanche victims. However, the "stuff" they all worry about most does occasionally come to pass. Earlier this year, Sugar Bowl's Ski Patrol was called out to help find a pilot believed missing in their area, eventually locating his plane in rugged country just outside the resort's boundaries and assisting in the recovery of his body. In 1998, self-described eco-raiders who claimed to be angry at Vail Resort's expansion into wildlife habitat systematically set fire to cafeterias and other facilities atop Vail Mountain, causing $12 million in damage. (No one was ever officially charged. with arson in the case.) And in 1990, a propane gas explosion shattered the Crested Butte State Bank building in the Colorado resort town, killing two women and seriously injuring two others. Roark Kiklevich, mountain manager at Crested Butte, said the mountain community "pulled together really well" in responding to that event, with resort personnel pitching in as needed. "We're a pretty small community, a small county actually, and we do everything possible to keep prepared," he said. "The Gunnison airport schedules major drills out there and we always, when we can, send some of our people out there to cross train with them." Like most big mountain resort areas, Kiklevich said Crested Butte's medical staff and Ski Patrol is all EMT certified. The resort's Mountain Disaster Plan is updated yearly, regular in-house drills are held with local Emergency Medical Service people and their Avalanche Dog program routinely trains with county Search And Rescue personnel. "This community has a huge number of EMTs," he added. "There's a lot of crossover between people who work the ambulance and are on the ski patrol. As a result, we all tend to work well together when things do go bad." Sewell, Kiklevich and Jim Spenst, vice president of operations at Tamarack - who got a crash course in security courtesy of the U.S. Secret Service during President Bush's recent visit to his fledgling mountain - all say it is unlikely their resorts will come into the crosshairs of international terrorists. But it is evident they have all at least considered the possibility. "Everybody was somewhat concerned after Vail," Crested Butte's Kiklevich said. "We're working more towards technological security systems, cameras and the like, but we're behind some of the other, larger areas on that front. We're revisiting those issues, and it's not something that's not talked about, but we've tried to concern ourselves with more natural hazards and mechanical failures." "We looked at our internal security after the president's visit and some lightning strikes started a couple of fires," said Tamarack's Spenst, formerly vice president of operations at Copper Mountain. "We're a young mountain and we're studying how we reacted with the Southern Idaho fire folks and the Secret Service. It's a little bit 'learn as you go.'" Like most large ski areas, Spenst said Tamarack is turning to technology to enhance its mountain security, adding cameras to cover their property and personnel to monitor them. "We do have a monitoring system in place," he said. "All installed in the last nine months." But even with new technology and careful planning it is evident that those lethal, seemingly arbitrary catastrophes that insurance underwriters lump under "Acts of God" do still occasionally strike a mountain - with deadly results. Less than a month ago, On Sept. 5, nine mountain tourists died and ten were seriously injured when a 1,500-pound concrete block carried by a helicopter near the Alpine resort of Solden, Austria crashed through the roof of a cable car running on a lift below, striking with such force that the occupants of two other cable cars were spilled out after the cable snapped like a "bowstring." The accident follows one in 1998 in Italy, when a U.S. Marine jet on a ground-hugging practice mission hit a cable carrying a gondola and sent it earthward, killing 20 people. Two years later 155 people died when a ski train caught fire in a tunnel near Kaprun, 100 kilometers from Salzburg, in Austria's worst peacetime disaster. Mountain managers who spoke to IR say they are braced to handle events spawned by fierce blizzards and avalanches, and several Western U.S. resorts have even drawn up plans to deal with avalanches triggered by California's network of fault lines - at least three of which run directly under Lake Tahoe. Their job, the mountain managers agree, is to plan for the worst and hope to hell it doesn't happen. "No one wants an incident on their mountain," said Sewell, who has four mountains to fret over at Aspen. "But if it does come to pass, we want to get on top of it quickly and make sure we come out ahead." « Previous Story | The Industry Report Home Page | Next Story » |
|
