Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Jake Foster of Hampden and his friend Radcliffe Mitchell of Veazie were sitting on the Spillway East chairlift at Sugarloaf on Tuesday morning, anticipating an enjoyable run through the 20 inches of new snow the ski resort received a day earlier.Then disaster struck.The cable that the chairs were attached to derailed, sending five of those chairs crashing 25 to 30 feet to the ground. At least eight people, three of them children, were taken to a hospital during a busy vacation week at the resort 120 miles north of Portland. Dozens of skiers remained on the crippled lift for more than an hour until patrols could get them down.Foster and Mitchell, both 21, were sitting side by side in a chair that remained suspended well above the slope.“We were just a couple of lift poles back, behind them. Probably 15 or 20 [chairs behind],” Foster said. “The lift stopped a couple of times and then inched forward a couple of times. When we started to go, we felt some pretty intense vibration on the cable that wasn’t right. We were like, ‘Uh-oh. What the heck?’ We heard people down below saying, ‘The cable came off.’ We could kind of see a crowd gathering up ahead.”From: http://ping.fm/XBDJ0
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