AUBURN — Age doesn’t matter.

That’s largely what national ski industry experts said Wednesday, about a week after at least eight people were injured when a 35-year-old chairlift at Sugarloaf Mountain Resort derailed and five chairs fell 25 to 30 feet to the snow below.

While much was made by the national media of the age of Spillway East, the Sugarloaf lift that failed last week — Sid Roslund, director of technical services at the National Ski Areas Association in Lakewood, Colo., said the rigorous maintenance and inspection regime for chairlifts in the U.S. virtually makes age a nonfactor.

“These lifts, if they are well-maintained and are going through all the various state inspection processes — they can last a very, very long time,” Roslund said.

At Lost Valley ski area in Auburn, it was business as usual as workers loaded skiers and snowboarders onto the neighborhood resort’s Chair No. 1. Wednesday afternoon.

At 45 years old, the locally iconic chairlift, which features seats painted yellow, blue, red and green, is the oldest operating lift in the state. It was installed in 1965, according to state records, but no one is counting, not even Lost Valley owner Connie King.

“I knew we had one of the oldest lifts in Maine but did not know it was the oldest,” King said. Like chairlifts across the state, it is not only well-loved but well-cared-for. Last summer, the resort replaced major components of the lift ahead of a state-required “load test” that occurs every seven years.

That test is done to ensure that all of the components of the lift are up to par, including the brakes that stop the lift for emergencies or other reasons.

“We put a lot into that lift this summer and it passed all the tests with flying colors,” King said.

Dave Byrd, director of education at the National Ski Areas Association in Colorado, said focusing only on the age of a lift would be misguided when it comes to determining safety.

He said ski resorts are constantly updating, upgrading and retrofitting parts that wear out. Like a well-maintained car, a well-maintained lift can provide decades of safe operation.

“When your tires wear out on your car, you don’t throw the car away, you replace the tires,” Roslund said.

The two-passenger, double-chair like Chair No. 1 at Lost Valley and like Spillway East was considered state-of-the-art technology 25 years ago, Roslund said. 

It was, at the time, the industry standard, and while chairlifts have evolved to become faster and bigger — able to carry between four and six people per seat — the double chair remains a common feature at ski areas across the U.S.

Resorts replace lifts more often to better serve their customers or to fix ever-changing patterns of use on a particular ski hill, rather than to address safety issues. 

The last time a person was killed in ski-lift-related accident was 1993 in California, Byrd said. And the chair involved was only a year or two old, he said.

“I worry there is this misleading notion when people use the age of lifts to judge their safety,” Byrd said. “The fact that our industry has gone 17 years without a lift-related fatality speaks to the overall safety of lifts at resorts.”

In all, a dozen people have been killed in chairlift mishaps in the U.S. since 1973 — six in Colorado, five in California and one in New York state.

In Maine, chairlifts are inspected annually by state-licensed inspectors who are usually working for a ski resort’s insurance company.

The reports of those inspections are reviewed by the state, and any problems they find are required to be corrected before the state will issue a license to operate the lift. 

Inspectors also go out and inspect lifts where problems are reported, and any time a resort has a serious lift problem, such as the Spillway incident at Sugarloaf, they are required to report to the state.

Doug Dunbar works for the Maine Office of Licensing and Registration, which includes the Board of Elevator and Tramway Safety, the agency that oversees chairlifts. He said Sugarloaf promptly reported the accident and that the state’s two chairlift inspectors remained at the resort investigating the accident this week.

Dunbar wrote in an e-mail message that he was unsure when that investigation would be complete. “The inspectors intend to do a thorough job,” he wrote.

Sugarloaf spokesman Ethan Austin said parts to repair the Spillway East chair arrived last week and had been installed, but he was unsure when the chair would be reopened for skiers.

According to a review of information provided by Dunbar, Maine has 49 aerial chairlifts — lifts that carry passengers suspended by a cable above the ground.

Sugarloaf has the second-oldest lift in the state. Its Bucksaw chair is 42. Saddleback Mountain in Dallas Plantation has the youngest lift in the state. Its Kennebago Quad is going on 2. The average age of a chairlift in Maine is 20 years.

sthistle@sunjournal.com

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