currently reading - Book of the New Sun: Sword of the Lyctor


Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”
-Susan Stryker


kda
@kda

So, on Whistler Mountain, there was this one chairlift, the Big Red Express (due to be replaced in time for the 2022–2023 ski season with a new lift by the same name), which was notable for, mostly, being remarkably miserable to ride on snowy, windy days; being ten minutes long; and:

Tower 6 on the Big Red Express, an offset tower.

This is a rare design feature on ropeways, which only really happens when there's a serious elevation differential across the several metres separating each side of the ropeway. Usually, they'll just build a tower tall enough to support both sides of the cable, unless it's way cheaper to not do that. Which, well, it is here.

But there's another thing that's weird about that tower. Like, here, let me show you a basically identical lift built by the same company, Doppelmayr, around the same year:

A tower on another high speed chairlift.

Check the tower heads on both — the ones on the second picture are normal for that manufacturer in that era. So where did the Big Red get its weird towers from? Basically the same shot of the Big Red from above, but it's on the Redline Express, its predecessor.

The Redline Express, installed in 1992. I'll get into why it only lasted five ski seasons in a bit, but basically, they ended up having to put that little side tower in because that lift was itself replacing the original Red Chair (1965–1992). Which was built, well, very differently from the big, beefy high-speed lifts that started to become the main workhorses of large ski resorts in the '80s, and which also had chairs that didn't require quite the same vertical clearance or other such space:

The original Red Chair at Whistler.

So, reusing the same alignment, which was the most direct route from "the top of whatever lift comes up from the base at Creekside" to "up a hill from the main lodge on the mountain, so that people can ski down to the ski racks", but with chairs that need way more vertical clearance and can support larger gaps between towers, meant sticking in a little side tower to make sure people's skis wouldn't brush against the snow (or worse!). Speaking of "worse", though, let's get into why the Redline was replaced maybe a sixth of the way into its theoretical service life:

The grip assembly used on Lift Engineering's high speed lifts.

Just rotate this 90° clockwise in your mind to think about how it works in practice. For clarity, this is a device intended to secure hundreds of kilograms of metal and passengers to a rope, usually in temperatures below freezing, under conditions where forces on the cable, such as those that occur in the event of an emergency stop, can result in reduced or absent gravitational force acting on the chair.

And for more clarity, look at the upper part of the "jaws" on the cable, and where the hinges are relative to the "jaws". Just one more thing: those tension-providing devices aren't lazily drawn metal springs; they're rubber "marshmallow" springs.

Can you see where the problem might be with this setup? Because this guy didn't:

Janek Kunczynski, president of Lift Engineering, AKA Yan.

Meet Janek Kunczynski, the founder of Lift Engineering & Manufacturing Co., AKA Yan, who might as well be the Elon Musk of ropeways. Before I get deeper into just how disastrous his detachable grip design was, let me show you another Incredible™ (derogatory) example of his engineering sensibilities:

The top terminal of the Redline Express. The bottom terminal of the Redline Express.

Allow me to remind you that this is usually operating in sub-zero temperatures, and that this specific lift was often subject to considerable wind and snow. As in, when mechanics were working on this chairlift, they'd have to do that with no protection from the elements. (It's also at least rumoured within the ropeway and ski resort industries that his lifts were routinely welded together in ski resort parking lots.) His whole thing was, basically, making lifts look cool and implementing them cheaply, to undercut his European competitors, which led not just to impractical designs that were hostile to the people maintaining them or prone to breaking down, but to his company's lifts killing at least five people and injuring at least seventy.

Which brings us back to Whistler:

A decommissioned chair from the Quicksilver Express, at Whistler.

Whistler, at the time in an arms race to outcompete Blackcomb, its neighbour, but lacking the sort of venture capital backing Blackcomb had, wanted to put in some high-speed lifts to be able to match the skiing experience at Blackcomb, which had already bought several such lifts from Doppelmayr (after buying several low-speed lifts from Yan). So they figured they'd take the cheap route, and get three high-speed lifts, of a fairly unproven design, installed. These were to replace three ancient lifts that were, at that point, constraining the resort's capacity.

While the Redline and Green both served through their five years of operation without any serious issues, the same can't be said for the Quicksilver Express, which was the only chairlift Yan ever built with "bubbles" on it — which required a slightly enhanced grip, to handle the additional weight.

It wasn't enhanced enough, though.

Progression of the Quicksilver accident. Quicksilver chair that fell to the ground.

The Quicksilver, specifically, was an unmitigated dumpster fire, even before any accidents happened. It was designed such that, in wind, grips could smack against towers, taking on damage in the process. It had a faulty brake system that would apply maximum braking force via the emergency brake when a normal stop is what the operator pressed the button for. At least a few empty chairs had straight up fallen off the cable before the accident. And then there were the grips.

These grips received multiple retrofits and rebuilds throughout the few years the lift was operating, which never seemed to help — they slipped so often that operators on the lift just stuffed paper into the grip force alarm to muffle it. The clearance between grips and towers was known to be below code, and Whistler stated that they simply couldn't fix it. Upon testing the grips after the accident, of 29 tested, every single one failed to perform adequately.

Furthermore, there was the whole thing with the rubber and the claws. Rubber springs lose performance at much less extreme temperatures than metal springs, and the way the grips were designed, a lot of their grip force relied on the chair applying force via gravity. Take away gravity, and the grip can slip. Take away gravity on a particularly steep section of the lift line, and you've got a cascade of chairs knocking each other off of the cable until they ram into a tower and fall to the ground.

So it was 1997, and Whistler, on the edge of going bankrupt from lawsuits and lost business, had to get rid of the other Yan high speed lifts, which were likely safer, but not safe enough. Some resorts retrofitted theirs to use a better grip design, but Whistler just got rid of them…

Big Red Express top terminal.

…other than the towers.

Big Red Express, with Yan towers visible.

ellivanelli
@ellivanelli

petition for katja to go on Well There's Your Problem as a guest host


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in reply to @kda's post:

it's slightly more of a pain but you can avoid image leeching by adding an image, saving the post as a draft, grabbing the image URL and using it in markdown, and removing the image from the upload section. image stays on the server, but only shows up where you embed it

avoids the old Forum Problem of posts having their images broken down the line, or occasionally being replaced with goatse by a vindictive web host