Safer Ski Areas for safer people?

[waxman]

I'm of the opinion "we" will be better off when we start removing warning labels on things that may obviously hurt us. The "don't put your fingers or other body parts" stickers on lawn mowers for example.

[old goat]

Yeah, the proposed bill was an attempt to circumvent the broad protections ski areas have from liability for skier injuries. The skier may have been entirely at fault for their own injury but if there is a deviation from the safety plan, however minor and however relevant to the injury at issue, they may be able to extort some money from the resort.

Ski resorts aren't perfect, but they're a lot more responsible than the average skier.

Now the biggest thing the resorts could do to reduce injuries would be to ban the consumption of alcohol. Even better, breathalyze every skier every run. I guarantee you that would help. How would the people in favor of reporting injuries feel about that?

[GoldMember]

I'm of the opinion "we" will be better off when we start removing warning labels on things that may obviously hurt us. The "don't put your fingers or other body parts" stickers on lawn mowers for example.

Yeah, you have to ask yourself how we got to where we are. Reminded me of this:

[altasnob]

Why does everyone think the proposed law would somehow opens up ski areas to liability? I skimmed the bill and nowhere does it say that it amends the CO law that makes ski areas immune from liability. The law looks more like a open public records, transparency law to me, and has nothing to do with increasing liability to ski areas. Just because a ski area would have to disclose injuries, and just because personal injury attorneys would have access to that information (just as everyone else) does no increase the liability potential on ski areas (because CO's Ski Safety Act limits liability and this new law does not supplant that).

The only potential liability on ski areas I can find in the new law is this:

"The bill makes any failure to create, maintain, and publish a safety plan or provide the required reports or data grounds for discipline by the passenger tramway safety board."

So if ski areas fail to abide by the law's requirements, they could face punishment. Just as if governments fail to follow open public records law, they face punishment. I am an open records guy myself.

[waxman]

Yeah, the proposed bill was an attempt to circumvent the broad protections ski areas have from liability for skier injuries. The skier may have been entirely at fault for their own injury but if there is a deviation from the safety plan, however minor and however relevant to the injury at issue, they may be able to extort some money from the resort.

Ski resorts aren't perfect, but they're a lot more responsible than the average skier.

Now the biggest thing the resorts could do to reduce injuries would be to ban the consumption of alcohol. Even better, breathalyze every skier every run. I guarantee you that would help. How would the people in favor of reporting injuries feel about that?

I'm thinking of various states and provinces that have laws in effect that basically say you can't sue operators of horse farms/ranches/facilities. Signs at the gates and in the barns stating as much. Lift tickets, seasons passes and signs in the bathrooms in the great white north are similar yet someone always sues when they huck their meat in the terrain park.

[GoldMember]

Why does everyone think the proposed law would somehow opens up ski areas to liability? I skimmed the bill and nowhere does it say that it amends the CO law that makes ski areas immune from liability. The law looks more like a open public records, transparency law to me, and has nothing to do with increasing liability to ski areas. Just because a ski area would have to disclose injuries, and just because personal injury attorneys would have access to that information (just as everyone else) does no increase the liability potential on ski areas (because CO's Ski Safety Act limits liability and this new law does not supplant that).

The only potential liability on ski areas I can find in the new law is this:

"The bill makes any failure to create, maintain, and publish a safety plan or provide the required reports or data grounds for discipline by the passenger tramway safety board."

So if ski areas fail to abide by the law's requirements, they could face punishment. Just as if governments fail to follow open public records law, they face punishment. I am an open records guy myself.

Regardless of what laws are in place, anyone can sue anyone at anytime for anything. Does that mean they win? No, of course not. However, if an attorney is able to stand in front of a jury and convince them that a ski area's safety plan was egregiously violated or ignored, they may be able to overcome the ski area defense of not being held liable due to State protections. It would certainly open the discussion as to whether the law should be nixed and rewritten in a way that CAN hold the area liable if it can be shown they were somehow viewed as negligent. It's a big can of worms, in my view.

Obvious disclosure: I'm not an attorney.

[altasnob]

If a law provides immunity from liability, the other party is not going to be able to extort money from you. Extortion only works when there is a least a chance the extorting party would win at trial. If there is immunity, the case wouldn't even get to trial (dismissed by the judge at an earlier stage). Plus, attorneys can't file frivolous claims without penalty. The Summit news op-ed argues in favor of the law because one can easily find statistics for skier injury and deaths outside ski areas through the avy center. Why can't one find this same information for injuries and deaths on forest service land in bounds? Do you think Democratic Senators Story and Danielson (Jefferson, Bolder, Denver, Gilpin Counties), the law's sponsors, are in bed with plaintiff's attorneys? Is seems to me big business (the ski areas) did a good job of duping the masses into thinking this law somehow benefited plaintiff's attorneys when in reality, big business enjoys the status quo that allows them to sweep disparaging facts under the rug.

[mtnjam]

I'll ask then, for the average ski area customer, what does this "law" boil down to meaning. To me it's a bunch of useless metrics that are just going to fill up more folders and get forgotten in the realms of someones office that only the bean counters and statisticians are going to look at?
Is each ski area going to publish their list of skier injuries and deaths and then let the general public decide if they want to come spend money at a place that "might be dangerous"?
I can only see that as just increasing the cost of a lift ticket at these areas so they can justify another bean counter position.

[thefortrees]

How do they handle this in yurp?

[GoldMember]

How do they handle this in yurp?

You're on your own.

[MagnificentUnicorn]

Yeah, you have to ask yourself how we got to where we are. Reminded me of this:

I don’t think the owner’s manual told you how to adjust your valves 50 years ago.


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[old goat]

The Colorado ski law says in part "a skier assumes the risk of any injury to person or property resulting from any of the inherent dangers and risks of skiing.”
By establishing the need for a safety plan, the law would create a potential argument that an injury that might somehow be related to a failure to adhere to the safety plan is not due to an inherent risk or danger. Whether such an argument would prevail I have no idea. If such a legal theory proved to be a winning one it would have the perverse effect of encouraging the resorts to barebones their safety plans so as to minimize the chance that they would deviate from it. Also, if a resort had a high rate of injuries, through no fault of its own, presumably that could be used in court to establish that the injury wasn't due to inherent risk but due to resort gross negligence. If the authors of the bill wanted to make it clear that failure to adhere to the safety plan did not establish liability for injuries they could have written that.
Do not underestimate the determination of the plaintiff's bar to undermine ski resorts' protection from liability. If they can't do it through the front door they'll do it from the back. They keep filing suits; one day a suit will stick and the door will be wide open.

[glademaster]

Maybe I'm just a humanist, but if you pay for a massive monopoly to use hudge swaths of public lands, you should be reporting your incident reports. To violently come out against that is showing a sick sick card. If we can see patterns and have any way to minimize them, especially through education, then why not? Otherwise, it's a missed opportunity, not a closed run, honestly. Why shouldn't there be transparency? Argue against that, because the lobby groups against this bill were absurd in their arguments.

And, let it be known, I duck ropes, ski fast, and take chances. I don't have a play in this fight.

Bravo! My sentiments exactly.

[ill-advised strategy]

Besides the reporting of deaths and injuries I'm curious what the group lobbying this bill has in store to make this trend decrease? Putting up more slow skiing signs and yellow jackets or should we just pad all the trees in the forest, line each run with nets "just in case", and have gondolas instead of chairlifts so people don't fall off chairs? Or is this group just lobbying to make noise and solve nothing.

It’s probably the same thing that always happens: somebody has a tragic outcome, their grieving family turns the grief into a mission to “never let this happen again”, nobody can tell the grieving family to knock it off because it’s just too hard to be the guy saying “sorry your loved one died but we’re not changing everything”. So this kind of stuff just steamrolls through.

[b0ardski]

lawyer is as lawyer does

[k2skier112]

I don’t think the owner’s manual told you how to adjust your valves 50 years ago.


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makes for a cute meme

http://chevy.oldcarmanualproject.com.../51omindex.htm

not even 70 years ago did the OWNERS manual show you valve adjusting

my 1995 Subie manual shows far more info on DYI stuff than my 1974 celica manual did


to add to the 'stupid people need a sticker" conversation, in the late 1990's MTD (lawnmowers) got sued by some college kids parents because they were drunk and used a push lawnmower as a hedge clipper. Now where in the manual did it say you "couldn't" use a lawnmower as a hedge clipper, so now the disclaimer in all , MTD, Troy-Bilt, Yardman...mowers owners manual. The college kid who lost an arm won his law suit

[Canada1]

[QUOTE=GoldMember;6309344]Pardon my cynicism but this reads like a playbook out of a personal injury attorney's wish list.



Find the injured parties with as much background information you can determine from the area's reporting. Find the easily accessible safety plan and start looking for the cracks around the edges you can exploit. File suit against said area. Win lots of money for client (and self).

QUOTE]
That is exactly what this is. I started to write some political thoughts and history of strength of the plaintiffs bar and how it effects costs of business in a state, but then realized no one here cares. Suffice it to say there are hard feelings with a corporate conglomerate prevailing in a recent wrongful death case and this was a lobbied response.

[altasnob]

Should theme parks be required to report accidents? Riding a roller coaster is inherently dangerous just like skiing. A deceased roller coaster rider assumed the risk. And if 100 people died on that same roller coaster, who cares about that too? When you put it this way, why should any industry have to report its accidents to the public? It hurts the companies' profits and therefore, us consumers have to pay more money.

Skiing deaths are not always the deceased being stupid. How many kids have been mowed down on the slopes due to out of control gapers? And when this happens, the only answer the family gets is, this is the way it is done.

The law didn't pass and when I skim over the articles on it, I never read any arguments it would increase liability on resorts. Reasons against the law were increased bureaucracy, it was not necessary because the National Ski Areas Association already does reports on accidents/deaths (we police our own). What appeared to me to be the real reason the law didn't pass is because other states do not have a similar law. CO didn't want CO resorts to be at any competitive disadvantage. In other words, race to the bottom. We are good at that in the USA.

[Canada1]

It was lobbied by the plaintiffs bar. It would open the door for punitive damages arguments and compound the size a scale of potential verdicts.

Yes, people die the same way over and over at ski areas. Do the benefits of tourism and recreation industry overshadow the individual rights of a party to sue the shit out of a corporate conglomerate.
I am somewhere in the middle on this. I want an area to pay when they screw up. Is the failure of an area to prevent up hiking on closed terrain their screw up? Is a fat, or even skinny, guy having a heart attack because he is exercising at altitude without proper warnings a screw up? Those are both recently litigated cases. Is leaving a snow cat parked behind an arguably blind corner without roping it off a screw up?

There are lots of reasons ski areas get sued. For me, some have merit and some don't. I guess I am addicted enough to the sport to feel like keeping it somewhat affordable by not having verdicts that make insurance go up even more outweigh the previously mentioned massive profits while using a national resource argument previously presented. Of course I use that same argument when I want to access national forest from an area to go side or backcountry. It's complicated.

[old goat]

Should theme parks be required to report accidents? Riding a roller coaster is inherently dangerous just like skiing. A deceased roller coaster rider assumed the risk. And if 100 people died on that same roller coaster, who cares about that too? When you put it this way, why should any industry have to report its accidents to the public? It hurts the companies' profits and therefore, us consumers have to pay more money.

Skiing deaths are not always the deceased being stupid. How many kids have been mowed down on the slopes due to out of control gapers? And when this happens, the only answer the family gets is, this is the way it is done.

The law didn't pass and when I skim over the articles on it, I never read any arguments it would increase liability on resorts. Reasons against the law were increased bureaucracy, it was not necessary because the National Ski Areas Association already does reports on accidents/deaths (we police our own). What appeared to me to be the real reason the law didn't pass is because other states do not have a similar law. CO didn't want CO resorts to be at any competitive disadvantage. In other words, race to the bottom. We are good at that in the USA.

1) the comparison is bullshit and you know it. riding a theme park ride is not inherently dangerous, the rider is a passive participant, and the only way to get hurt is if the design or condition of the ride is defective
2) how is a ski resort responsible if a kid is mowed down by an out of control gaper? How does compiling injuring statistics prevent that. What safety plan could reasonably prevent that? ( I have no problem if people who mow down other people get sued).
3) the reason the threat of lawsuits wasn't part of the arguments against the bill is political--a lot of state legislators are lawyers, and the argument against increased bureaucracy and govt intrusion is a more powerful one these days.

Reading this thread the impression I get from the people who post in favor of the law is a generalized unfocused hate of the ski industry without any thought given to what actual concrete benefits would result from the law.

[GoldMember]

I don’t think the owner’s manual told you how to adjust your valves 50 years ago.


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You never owned an old British sports car, did you...

[altasnob]

The ski areas have safety plans regardless of this law. The law was attempting to make those safety plans public. Even without the law, those safety plans would likely be disclosed to the plaintiff in a lawsuit through discovery and if the resort doesn't want the world to see it, it would have a protective order not to disclose.

A 10 year standing on top of the knoll who gets mowed down by a reckless snowboarder has done nothing wrong. The reckless snowboarder does not have deep pockets so suing them is worthless (just like suing an uninsured motorist is worthless). The ski area can prevent these accidents by having slow skiing signs, and employees on the slopes yelling at people to slow down. In areas where risk of collision is high, they can even put up fences where people have to come nearly to a stop to get through. Ski areas do this. Opening up accident data would allow the public to make sure ski areas can do this. An innocent 10 year old could be hurt, and Mikaela Shafer could be hurt innocently. Does not matter how bad ass anyone thinks they are. In this scenario, the snowboarder is 100% at fault and so the injured party is a passive participant just like the roller coaster rider.

[GoldMember]

Reading this thread the impression I get from the people who post in favor of the law is a generalized unfocused hate of the ski industry without any thought given to what actual concrete benefits would result from the law.

Or unintended consequences. The overall cost for insurance, need for third-party consultancy for authoring and annual certification of safety plans, etc. The closure of terrain where any bump over 2' tall is deemed hazardous, treed areas closed due to the inherent danger of collision, steeper runs that may have avalanche potential permanently closed, etc. This is a can of worms that could ruin and/or kill the sport if it were a nationwide development. For Colorado, if this is adopted and the above outcomes occur, it would be very chilling to tourism as visitors go elsewhere. As you noted, the difference between skiing in natural terrain versus a failed carnival ride, a mechanical device specifically designed for its use with the rider as a passenger, isn't a valid comparison.

[GoldMember]

A 10 year standing on top of the knoll who gets mowed down by a reckless snowboarder has done nothing wrong. The reckless snowboarder does not have deep pockets so suing them is worthless (just like suing an uninsured motorist is worthless). The ski area can prevent these accidents by having slow skiing signs, and employees on the slopes yelling at people to slow down. In areas where risk of collision is high, they can even put up fences where people have to come nearly to a stop to get through. Ski areas do this. Opening up accident data would allow the public to make sure ski areas can do this. An innocent 10 year old could be hurt, and Mikaela Shafer could be hurt innocently. Does not matter how bad ass anyone thinks they are. In this scenario, the snowboarder is 100% at fault and so the injured party is a passive participant just like the roller coaster rider.

And therein lies the problem. The ski area didn't do anything wrong but gets the brunt of the penalty just because they are the ones assumed to have the money. Again, insurance companies will cost the areas much more in premium penalties on top of requiring their own acceptance of the area's safety plan. This is a can of worms and putting it onto the areas just because it's deemed they have the cash is just a wrong action. Besides, who knows how much money the snowboarder or family have? This idea greenlights recklessness by the participants; no liability, no penalty.

[Canada1]

"The ski area can prevent these accidents by having slow skiing signs, and employees on the slopes yelling at people to slow down. In areas where risk of collision is high, they can even put up fences where people have to come nearly to a stop to get through." Ski areas do this

You should ski Vail. They have yellow jackets all over the place yelling at you. For me, they don't add value to the experience. They probably do make me safer, but the cost may outweigh the benefit. But certainly, your attitude, and like minded individuals have created an environment where this sort of mountain police force is mandatory.

I guess I never had a problem with the patrol just making you clean up the parking lot or pulling your pass when you were a dumb ass. Perspectives vary.