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  1. #76
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    I fell off a kitchen chair once but I was pretty drunk at the time.

  2. #77
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    Crotch grabbers
    Most kid lifts have these days
    Is it that expensive?
    . . .

  3. #78
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    Wait a sec--the issue is a kid that fell off because they didn't load properly and the lift op didn't stop the lift in time. With small kids the lift ops should slow the lift, make sure they kids are loaded properly, and make sure the bar comes down (there should be a bar, preferably one that won't allow a kid to slide under) and stop the lift if there's a problem. Bars or no bars, lift ops need to be properly trained and attentive, especially those that work beginner lifts and there need to be enough of them. For all the shit said about lift ops I've seen them do all of the above multiple times, preventing accidents when kids-and adults-fail to load properly. (OTOH a lift op failed to stop the lift when a group behind us in line got on our chair while we were standing on the loading bar and knocked us off the end of the ramp.)

  4. #79
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    Quote Originally Posted by flowing alpy View Post
    ...to tbs’ point, mine got knocked out of a quad shortly
    after loading, when the F*O*G sitting between us,
    wearing a pack, turned and brushed Q off the chair.
    totally forgot there was a kid sitting next to him.
    boy was stirred & shook but landed in soft, thank UllR.

    you can’t just trust any random adult to be lift woke
    I take it this happened when Q was little? And I’m guessing you had some harsh words for this douche.

    Packs are a big hazard on lifts IMO. Should require them to be in laps while on a chair
    Like you say, some random adult riding with a kid isn’t necessarily a good thing.

  5. #80
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    Maybe i'm in the minority here, but I think many 6 year olds are more than capable of riding a chairlift without an adult if taught how to properly ride the lift as long as the chair is low enough to the snow. Obviously, it is up to the instructor to assess whether a particular child has the necessary maturity and dexterity.

    I used to be a kids' ski instructor in high school. We had kids as young a 4 ride the lift with another child, but it 100% depends on the kid. There is no way for every kid in a group lesson to ride with an adult.
    There just aren't enough instructors for that. I would much rather a kid ride with another child in their group than a random adult beginner who could take them out or get in their way on the way on or off the chair. Usually, once the kid is ready to graduate from the carpet or rope tow to the ski lift (skiing-ability wise), they are also capable of riding a lift without an adult. Will accidents happen occasionally, sure. If you want to completely eliminate the risk of your kid getting hurt, better to let them stick to fortnight.

  6. #81
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    Eldora parents start petition for safety upgrades

    I’ve still yet to see a source confirm that she didn’t load properly. The petition implies that because the petition says people were screaming at them to stop the lift. Was she still at the LZ when they were screaming? That lift is super slow.

    Maybe I missed it. Not trying to blame her or anyone, I’m just wondering what really happened.

    Also vibes to the little girl.. heal up and get back to skiing
    If we're gonna wear uniforms, we should all wear somethin' different!

  7. #82
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    Maybe #7 should be moved to #1 on the skiers safety code. Never really understood why the first thing you do to go skiing at a resort is the last thing on the code. Maybe all lessons should start with with a clear understanding of the safety code. Maybe all season and day passes should have the buyer sign that they understand the code. Maybe legal guardians should understand what they’re signing. Maybe lift ops should pay attention more. Lots of maybes in skiing these days.

  8. #83
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    On a Long Ski Day ... the Bars with footrests are kinda sweet …. whatever

    Its a Lift, not a Roller Coaster ! mandatory height.. midget discrimination!

    Geeky Adults fall off all the time... Heck.some season pass holder at Killington ,long ago, tried to sit in the Lift spot ,my sister was sitting in/why on earth ,this lady hopped over at the last second was beyond me-she has the two right seats to herself on a quad. She proceeded to slide off my sisters lap and get totally run over...looked up like she was victimized too after..cool she did not get hurt..it looked ugly
    ski paintingshttp://michael-cuozzo.fineartamerica.com" horror has a face; you must make a friend of horror...horror and moral terror.. are your friends...if not, they are enemies to be feared...the horror"....col Kurtz

  9. #84
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    Quote Originally Posted by Danno View Post
    Be as obnoxious and dismissive as you like. But if it was your kid that fell and got seriously injured you might think differently. Whether something should be done or not is a valid question, but that doesn't mean there are not legitimate safety questions to ask. And lord knows Eldora of all places should not get a pass when asking questions.
    This is an important point. I remember someone asking in OEC class whether or not a fractured forearm was a "serious injury." The instructor responded with, "is it my arm or someone else's?" Statistical realities don't hold up so well when someone important to you is an injured (or worse) outlier.

    Statistically, I find it hard to believe that "safety bars" make a significant difference. Ski-area insurance companies must have good statistics on lift-related injuries (or lack thereof), unlike those of us operating on anecdote and occasional news reports. If the claim rate was substantially different with and without bars, every lift in the U.S. would have a bar, and every resort would have a strict "thou shalt use thy bar" policy. At the very least, the more-recent chairs that were installed without bars but that have the provisions for them (attachment points and such) would have been retrofitted. The data from Vermont and New York (with strict state-level policies on bars) should be dramatically different than that from ski areas without bars if the bars made such a significant difference.

    Instead, we have lifts in a number of states that don't have bars at all, which strongly implies that the data shows no such significant difference.

    Quote Originally Posted by Danno View Post
    Since you have kids, surely you've noticed that kids do stupid shit sometimes, even when well taught not to do that stupid shit?
    I'm not convinced the bars are actually helpful in that regard. I think the lack of bars decreases perceived safety, just as a narrower road with less sight distance decreases perceived safety in a car, and the natural human reaction is to adjust behavior accordingly. I've seen a lot more horseplay with bars down than with bars up.

    FWIW, I'm aware of at least two ski areas that set a minimum age of 7 for kids to ride the lift without an adult, at least while in resort-supervised programs. While a hard age cutoff probably isn't ideal, it seems like a reasonable choice to make from an organizational standpoint (leaving it up to individual employees, some of whom are teenagers, to decide which kids should or shouldn't be accompanied sounds like a plaintiff's lawyer's dream)

  10. #85
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    Oh, and adding to the anecdotal bits: I've never seen of, or heard a second-hand account, of anyone falling off mid-span (i.e. in an incident not related to loading or unloading), bar or no. I have read news reports and heard third- and nth-hand reports of such.

    I have been on the chair (as a kid) when another kid fell off within a tower of the return terminal; I've fallen off myself within 15 feet of loading once recently*, and probably more than once before that; and one of the guys I work with now has been knocked unconscious by a bar coming down unaided on a bouncy load (yes, he was wearing a helmet, and yes, he fell out of the chair as a result). So the anecdotal evidence I've got includes zero evidence that bars are helpful and some that they can cause injury (but I'd bet on that being an outlier again, whether just due to poor design and insufficient bar counterweight on that chair, or just "random shit happening").

    *: most recent incident: other coach caught his tips in the pit just after loading, toughed it out, and caused the chair to rock back and dump me because I wasn't remotely close to expecting that and didn't hang on; clearly a combo of user error and questionable pit maintenance

  11. #86
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    Another reason not to have children
    and if you do have kids, make sure they stay inside and play video games and have an ipad in front of them

    if your kids is too retarded to sit still in a chair going up hill maybe increase the ritalin does

  12. #87
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    Quote Originally Posted by TBS View Post
    OK, so how many people do you know that have fallen out of chairs?
    I’ve seen it happen twice in my 15 years of skiing. Both on chairs w/o a bar. Both times on hard pack. One died. Kind of a shitty thing to watch happen.

    Hope that fills your need for antidotal data.

    But why does it matter to you? And why are you so anti progress. Safety bars do not gaurentee not falling out, but they do make a difference. Stop being such and obtuse old fuck.

  13. #88
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    We should just demand that all old lifts be replaced with gondolas. That WOULD be safer.


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    Quote Originally Posted by Benny Profane View Post
    Keystone is fucking lame. But, deadly.

  14. #89
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    Since we are talking abut the effectiveness of safety bars, the industry calls them footrests/comfort bar for a reason and does not use the term safety bar much any more.

    I have seen/worked on a lot of guests who fell out of the chair, maybe 30 in 33 years.

    The vast majority were from a mis-load at the bottom, the next largest group were usually kids sitting/sliding forward and getting ready to unload near the top. I dealt with one person who fell out (patroller) when her pack caused her to sit too far forward and the entire pad and seat base fell out with her.

    Comfort bars or whatever can help or they can create a sense of false security and invite guests to fuck around leading to an accident.

    Ski areas are usually located on mountains and are covered in a slippery substance called snow, they are by nature dangerous at times. Can they be made less dangerous? Yes. Do far too many people confuse them with video games or Disneyworld? Yes. Do too many parents drop the kiddos off at Funtime Mountain with some unrealistic expectation that someone will watch little Johnnie? Yes.

    /rant.

  15. #90
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    Eldora parents start petition for safety upgrades

    Edit to add: This^^^^

    Most folks I see at the resorts have no clue about the dangers of the sport. Pre Vail, KW was a fairly woke place in that respect. My biggest complaint about VR is the idiots it attracts to its resorts and their infiltration at my home hill. When I (rarely) head over to Heavenly, it is fairly scary to ski on piste due to the obliviousness of most guests.

    Quote Originally Posted by old goat View Post
    Wait a sec--the issue is a kid that fell off because they didn't load properly and the lift op didn't stop the lift in time. With small kids the lift ops should slow the lift, make sure they kids are loaded properly, and make sure the bar comes down (there should be a bar, preferably one that won't allow a kid to slide under) and stop the lift if there's a problem. Bars or no bars, lift ops need to be properly trained and attentive, especially those that work beginner lifts and there need to be enough of them. For all the shit said about lift ops I've seen them do all of the above multiple times, preventing accidents when kids-and adults-fail to load properly. (OTOH a lift op failed to stop the lift when a group behind us in line got on our chair while we were standing on the loading bar and knocked us off the end of the ramp.)
    This
    Last edited by Ottime; 03-20-2019 at 09:27 AM.

  16. #91
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    Just now hearing about this. I wonder what will come of it.

  17. #92
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    Quote Originally Posted by anotherVTskibum View Post
    This is an important point. I remember someone asking in OEC class whether or not a fractured forearm was a "serious injury." The instructor responded with, "is it my arm or someone else's?" Statistical realities don't hold up so well when someone important to you is an injured (or worse) outlier.

    Statistically, I find it hard to believe that "safety bars" make a significant difference. Ski-area insurance companies must have good statistics on lift-related injuries (or lack thereof), unlike those of us operating on anecdote and occasional news reports. If the claim rate was substantially different with and without bars, every lift in the U.S. would have a bar, and every resort would have a strict "thou shalt use thy bar" policy. At the very least, the more-recent chairs that were installed without bars but that have the provisions for them (attachment points and such) would have been retrofitted. The data from Vermont and New York (with strict state-level policies on bars) should be dramatically different than that from ski areas without bars if the bars made such a significant difference.

    Instead, we have lifts in a number of states that don't have bars at all, which strongly implies that the data shows no such significant difference.



    I'm not convinced the bars are actually helpful in that regard. I think the lack of bars decreases perceived safety, just as a narrower road with less sight distance decreases perceived safety in a car, and the natural human reaction is to adjust behavior accordingly. I've seen a lot more horseplay with bars down than with bars up.

    FWIW, I'm aware of at least two ski areas that set a minimum age of 7 for kids to ride the lift without an adult, at least while in resort-supervised programs. While a hard age cutoff probably isn't ideal, it seems like a reasonable choice to make from an organizational standpoint (leaving it up to individual employees, some of whom are teenagers, to decide which kids should or shouldn't be accompanied sounds like a plaintiff's lawyer's dream)
    Vail installs bars on all their lifts because it significantly lowers their insurance rates. No idea if there is any correlation to actual safety, but the insurer sure thinks so.

    I see your point about perceived safety, but I don’t think it is true. In a small percentage of individuals a safety bar may hinder safety, but overall it is a zero sum or net positive. No data to support this assertion, but this is TGR, so I should just act like I’m an authority on the subject.

  18. #93
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    https://www.nsaa.org/media/310500/Li...Sheet_2017.pdf

    In this data set 71% of falls from chairlifts occur with chairs that have footrests/comfort bars.

  19. #94
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    Quote Originally Posted by Not bunion View Post

    Ski areas are usually located on mountains and are covered in a slippery substance called snow, they are by nature dangerous at times. Can they be made less dangerous? Yes. Do far too many people confuse them with video games or Disneyworld? Yes. Do too many parents drop the kiddos off at Funtime Mountain with some unrealistic expectation that someone will watch little Johnnie? Yes.

    /rant.
    Totally true. But the resorts shouldn't be absolved of their role here. They WANT people to view them as Disney world, they want parents to believe that little Johnnie is being watched closely at all times. They (and we) may know that isn't true, but they don't want to make that abundantly clear (outside of some long legal waiver that people sign but don't read).

    Many parents didn't know that their 6 year old was riding a double chair with another 6 year old. There may have been no other options, and it may have been done this way for years, but the resort had a vested interest in not being completely transparent about this.
    "fuck off you asshat gaper shit for brains fucktard wanker." - Jesus Christ
    "She was tossing her bean salad with the vigor of a Drunken Pop princess so I walked out of the corner and said.... "need a hand?"" - Odin
    "everybody's got their hooks into you, fuck em....forge on motherfuckers, drag all those bitches across the goal line with you." - (not so) ill-advised strategy

  20. #95
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    Quote Originally Posted by skiracer88_00 View Post
    Loveland currently (not just "back in my day") doesn't have a safety bar on their beginner lift. I had 4 kids learn to ski on that lift. No problems, and I have never heard of anyone falling off of that lift. Just teach your kid to sit back and not goof off. There is no reason anyone should fall off a chairlift...bar or not.

    I remember seeing a study at some point that just as many kids fall off of lifts with bars than they do without bars.

    I feel the same way about stop signs on school buses. Why cant we just teach our kids how to properly cross the f***ing street?
    I never use the bar and it generally pisses me off when people slam it down without saying anything, because I grew up skiing in the midwest and legit didn't know what a "Safety bar" was til I was in my 20s.

    That said, I worked at loveland and I watched a kid fall of the valley's bunny slope chairlift right in front of me. He just sorta... leaned forward (he was by himself on the chair, and I was an instructor with my own class to worry about) and then flopped out. They had to bring a lifeflight in for him.

  21. #96
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    Quote Originally Posted by Ottime View Post
    Vail installs bars on all their lifts because it significantly lowers their insurance rates. No idea if there is any correlation to actual safety, but the insurer sure thinks so.

    I see your point about perceived safety, but I don’t think it is true. In a small percentage of individuals a safety bar may hinder safety, but overall it is a zero sum or net positive. No data to support this assertion, but this is TGR, so I should just act like I’m an authority on the subject.
    I don't suppose you can quantify "significantly" in a public setting, by any chance?

    I'm really curious because I can think of a few relatively modern chairs that have fittings for bars but don't actually have them. I get that retrofitting an older chair that doesn't even have fittings could be cost-prohibitive, especially if the manufacturer doesn't exist and you need to get someone to fab custom bars, but for relatively recent lifts (I'm thinking of a 1996 Garaventa CTEC detachable in particular) the only downsides I can come up with are cost and weight, and I would think you could just pull an appropriate number of carriers off the line if the added weight from the bars was an issue. From a financial standpoint, not installing bars for a "significant" decrease in an annual cost seems silly, unless the cost for bar installation is substantially more significant. Then again, I'm not really a dentist, and I didn't stay at the Holiday Inn Express last night.

    I'm trying to see if I can find any more concrete examples of relatively recent lifts (particularly detachables) without bars, but aside from looking through tons of photos, I'm not sure quite how to pull that off.

    Also, recent but anecdotal: https://nltimes.nl/2019/02/22/dutch-...rench-ski-lift

  22. #97
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    Quote Originally Posted by Not bunion View Post
    https://www.nsaa.org/media/310500/Li...Sheet_2017.pdf

    In this data set 71% of falls from chairlifts occur with chairs that have footrests/comfort bars.
    On it's own this data is meaningless. What percentage of all lifts have bars? Was there a higher percentage of accidents on bar-less lifts?

  23. #98
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    Quote Originally Posted by boardtodeath View Post
    I never use the bar and it generally pisses me off when people slam it down without saying anything, because I grew up skiing in the midwest and legit didn't know what a "Safety bar" was til I was in my 20s.
    Agree on the slamming down problem, but the phenomena of not using the bar when it's there confuses me. I do this too - perfectly good bar, often with footrests, and my instinct is to not use it. Why the hell wouldn't we use it? Are we trying to be tough?

    What is wrong with us?

  24. #99
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    Quote Originally Posted by anotherVTskibum View Post
    I don't suppose you can quantify "significantly" in a public setting, by any chance?

    I'm really curious because I can think of a few relatively modern chairs that have fittings for bars but don't actually have them. I get that retrofitting an older chair that doesn't even have fittings could be cost-prohibitive, especially if the manufacturer doesn't exist and you need to get someone to fab custom bars, but for relatively recent lifts (I'm thinking of a 1996 Garaventa CTEC detachable in particular) the only downsides I can come up with are cost and weight, and I would think you could just pull an appropriate number of carriers off the line if the added weight from the bars was an issue. From a financial standpoint, not installing bars for a "significant" decrease in an annual cost seems silly, unless the cost for bar installation is substantially more significant. Then again, I'm not really a dentist, and I didn't stay at the Holiday Inn Express last night.

    I'm trying to see if I can find any more concrete examples of relatively recent lifts (particularly detachables) without bars, but aside from looking through tons of photos, I'm not sure quite how to pull that off.

    Also, recent but anecdotal: https://nltimes.nl/2019/02/22/dutch-...rench-ski-lift
    What the fuck? How could you not notice that a child’s head was stuck between the bar and armrest?

    Just brought that fucking bar right down immediately without asking and looking around and then and yakking on?




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    Quote Originally Posted by Benny Profane View Post
    Keystone is fucking lame. But, deadly.

  25. #100
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jong Lafitte View Post
    I’ve still yet to see a source confirm that she didn’t load properly. The petition implies that because the petition says people were screaming at them to stop the lift. Was she still at the LZ when they were screaming? That lift is super slow.

    Maybe I missed it. Not trying to blame her or anyone, I’m just wondering what really happened.

    Also vibes to the little girl.. heal up and get back to skiing
    I have not seen any formal report, but the eyewitness reports I read all said that she never fully loaded, and they were yelling at the liftie to stop the lift because she was going higher and higher while not fully loaded, but the lift wasn't stopped until after she fell. She was reportedly ~30' high when she fell.

    As I noted before, the accident that spurred this petition appears to be a liftie-related one, and a safety bar sure wouldn't have helped her, and it's not clear that an adult would have either, especially if that adult was a beginner (but maybe, hard to know, and very hard to know when only going by reports and not having seen the accident).

    This petition is essentially the result of the posts that not bunion and I have above, the parents realized that the resort's portrait of it being a safe disneyland was not true. I think the responsibility for that realization lies both with the parents and the resort. The parents have a responsibility to educate themselves about the sport in general and the lessons being offered at this resort in particular, but the resort has a responsibility to be transparent as well. Not to mention a responsibility to take all reasonable safety measures. Which brings us back to the question of what are reasonable safety measures.
    "fuck off you asshat gaper shit for brains fucktard wanker." - Jesus Christ
    "She was tossing her bean salad with the vigor of a Drunken Pop princess so I walked out of the corner and said.... "need a hand?"" - Odin
    "everybody's got their hooks into you, fuck em....forge on motherfuckers, drag all those bitches across the goal line with you." - (not so) ill-advised strategy

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