Gondola safety in doubt
KELLOGG, Idaho – At least half the ski lift gondola cabins at Silver Mountain resort are overdue for new parts, safety inspections or both, said Tim Pipkin, a lead gondola mechanic at the resort who resigned earlier this month in what he describes as a falling-out with resort management over safety.
Pipkin backed his allegations with a thick stack of maintenance records kept by him and previous mechanics. He said managers at Silver Mountain continually rebuffed his complaints about safety problems so he made photocopies of the records to protect himself from legal trouble should an accident occur. Several other former employees backed Pipkin’s claims that the resort was cutting corners on gondola maintenance.
Silver Mountain’s manager, Brian Rhodes, insists the ski lifts are safe and undergo regular inspections. Rhodes described Pipkin as a “disgruntled” employee who quit after butting heads with his supervisor. Silver Mountain is owned by Eagle Crest, which is a subsidiary of Jeld-Wen, a large manufacturer of doors and windows.
“Maintaining the safety of that gondola and the overall reputation as a world-class destination is very important to Silver Mountain,” Rhodes said. “The company has not shied away from spending money.”
The 3-mile-long aerial tramway, touted by Silver Mountain as the world’s longest single-stage gondola, opened in 1990 and has operated with a clean safety record and no instances of shutdown because of mechanical failure, Rhodes said. Like other ski areas, Silver Mountain’s insurance company sends engineers to inspect the tramway twice yearly. There are no routine state or federal safety inspections of ski lifts at Idaho resorts located on private land, including Silver Mountain. All ski areas in Washington are inspected twice yearly by engineers hired by the state Parks and Recreation Commission, said Dale Broyles, facilities manager for the agency.
Pipkin said he quit July 3 after he telephoned his boss and reported what he said was a dangerous situation involving the gondola cables sagging from several tower supports. Fixing the problem could have meant a week of downtime for the lift.
Shortly after Pipkin quit, Silver Mountain hired an independent engineer from Spokane to investigate his claim. The engineer, Jim Ellis, rode the tram July 11 and inspected the towers in question. In a report dated July 15, Ellis said he found no major problems and concluded, “the claim by the disgruntled employee was not valid.”
Pipkin said that when he reported the sagging cable, he was yelled at and called a liar. “That’s when I absolutely walked off the job,” he said. “I said, ‘If you don’t believe me then you can take care of it yourself.’ “
Since then, Pipkin said, he has fretted over what to do. He said he has been wracked with anxiety, and decided to take his concerns to the media three weeks after walking away from his job.
“If somebody ends up getting hurt or killed, I don’t want it to be on my conscience,” Pipkin said, during an interview last week in his home in Osburn, Idaho. “I’m going after nothing. There is no money involved here. It’s about other people’s safety. I just want to fix it. The maintenance just isn’t being done.”
Pipkin said that when he quit, at least 60 of 109 gondola cabins were overdue for their mandatory five-year safety inspection – in at least one case, the inspection was five years overdue, according to Pipkin’s accounting of the hand-written logs. And 60 cabins were overdue for scheduled parts replacement, including the grip arm, which secures the gondolas to a 2-inch-thick steel cable, according to Pipkin.
About 20 cabins had their grip arms rebuilt by Pipkin this year and another 10 underwent stress tests, Pipkin said.
Rhodes disputed the numbers and said 39 cabins were rebuilt and stress-tested this year. Another 15 are scheduled to undergo stress testing before the ski season, Rhodes said Wednesday. “We’re well on track as far as cabin testing,” he said.
The gondola cable stretches over parts of Kellogg. Watching from town Wednesday, Pipkin said, he noticed that several cabins had been taken out of service. He laughed when told that Rhodes said 39 cabins had been tested and rebuilt this year.
“It’d be nice if they could hook everybody up to a polygraph,” Pipkin said.
Although the records were photocopied in June, only a handful of the logs show entries for maintenance in the last year. That’s exactly the problem, Pipkin said. “There’s a lot of them that never even got touched.” Most of Pipkin’s orders for replacement parts were canceled this spring, he said.
Rhodes told a different story and said parts orders were not canceled and managers were never aware of Pipkin’s concerns until he resigned.
“If he had come to any officer within the company, any manager, it would have been brought to my attention,” Rhodes said.
Three other former employees of the resort, including Silver Mountain’s longtime maintenance manager, have also expressed concern to The Spokesman-Review about the safety of gondola operations. The employees said they felt pressure from resort management in recent years to keep the lift system running even when weather conditions or equipment trouble should have warranted a shutdown.
Former gondola operator Kurt Scholz said he was threatened with firing after making complaints about the condition of the gondola system and the maintenance backlog. Scholz, who worked at the mountain for four years, was fired in spring 2004.
“I never got an explanation” for why he was fired, the Osburn resident said. “When you complain or do something about the poor equipment they dump you. If you say something, you’re fired.
“When I left there, there were at least 20 cabins which could not, I guarantee, pass an inspection,” said Scholz, who now operates a lawn care business. “I will not go near the place. I will not ride that gondola.”
Resort manager Rhodes said maintenance budgets have increased over the last five years.
The gondola “is our life bread to making Silver Mountain work,” Rhodes said. “There’s no limit on resources available to maintain the operation of this piece of equipment.”
Touted as the fastest ski lifts in the region, Silver Mountain’s gondolas are capable of shuttling 1,600 people an hour from downtown Kellogg to an alpine lodge at 5,700-feet. From the lodge, skiers have access to dozens of runs, as well as a chairlift system to access runs higher in elevation. During summer months, the gondolas are used by mountain bikers, hikers, picnickers and paintball enthusiasts. This weekend, the resort is hosting a popular beer and music festival atop the mountain.
The summer activities are part of an ambitious expansion project at the resort, which is scheduled to eventually include a new golf course and 1,000 new condominiums and houses. Also planned is a new ski lift system that could keep the mountain open during periods of higher wind, Rhodes said.
Many residents and businesses in the Silver Valley say the resort’s expansion has provided much of the horsepower for the region’s nascent economic recovery. Pipkin said he has been feeling “massive tension” about going public with his concerns over resort operations.
Another former employee, Robert LaFleur, said he and others saw safety infractions and maintenance shortcuts but kept quiet out of fear of losing their jobs. Even after leaving his job in 2004 as a gondola and lift operator, LaFleur said, he did not want to talk about problems he saw, including the gondola being operated in winds up to 56 mph – despite guidelines that call for shutting it down at lower wind speeds – and several occasions when the gondola’s automatic safety shutoff features were bypassed to keep the system running.
“We just keep our mouths shut,” said LaFleur, who lives in Kingston and worked at the resort for four seasons. LaFleur said Pipkin was one of the few people willing to stick their necks out to complain. “If it wouldn’t have been for Tim, there wouldn’t have been a lot of stuff getting done,” LaFleur said.
Pipkin, a grandfather, started working at the mountain five years ago. The job came after he had suffered a heart attack and his doctor suggested a less stressful career. He previously worked as a plant engineer and senior fiber optics inspector in the Seattle area for Bechtel Corporation, one of the world’s largest engineering and construction firms. For the past two years, Pipkin said, he has worked as the lead gondola mechanic at Silver Mountain, with duties that included ordering parts and conducting regular stress testing on the cabins.
Typically, about 20 gondolas a year were scheduled to undergo maintenance and stress testing, which involves a complete tear-down of the cabins and employs a fluorescent dye to identify hidden hairline cracks in the high-strength steel skeleton. Pipkin was certified in March to conduct the tests, which are standard practice at ski areas nationwide and are required by insurance companies.
Industry and insurance standards call for the cabins to be tested every five years. But, Pipkin said, he was given neither the time nor budget to conduct the tests. He said $100,000 from the annual parts budget – more than half – was cut, making it impossible to keep up with scheduled repairs.
The standards also call for the grip arms to be inspected and rebuilt every four years, Pipkin said. The arms reach up from the top of the gondola and grip the thick steel cable much like a human hand clutching a rope, but with springs capable of exerting 3,000 pounds of pressure. Eventually, the springs weaken and need to be replaced, as do many other parts on the gondolas and series of 45 cable support towers.
“For a while they were buying all the parts, then they put a stop to it,” Pipkin claimed.
About 60 of the steel grips are in need of rebuilding and many are “way, way worn out,” Pipkin said. Faulty grips could result in a backslide, where the gondolas would slide downhill on the cable.
Silver Mountain’s gondolas ride more than 200 feet above the ground in some places, exposing them to powerful mountain winds. This makes updated parts and safety inspections even more important, Pipkin said. Although Silver Mountain has a policy of shutting down the gondola system and closing the resort in times of high wind, Pipkin and other former employees say the resort’s own wind rules are sometimes ignored.
The gondola’s manufacturer, VonRoll Transport Systems, recommends a full shut-down when winds reach 35 mph, according to an operations manual supplied by Pipkin. The manual notes that wind speeds are not always the best indicator of danger. Silver Mountain’s wind policies call for an “immediate shutdown” when winds reach 45 mph. Pipkin said Silver Mountain managers sometimes ignore high wind warnings.
Pipkin kept printouts of wind speed readings taken from one of the towers, including a chart showing wind gusts of 53 mph on Jan. 31. Despite protests from employees, the gondolas were not shut down that day, he said.
Russell Rumbaugh, a former supervisor at the mountain who wrote the most recent wind guidelines, said he was under pressure by the resort’s manager, Rhodes, to keep the system running during high wind.
“We followed (the guidelines) pretty closely until we got the new manager. He was like, ‘Oh, we can run this faster,’ ” said Rumbaugh, who worked at the mountain for 13 years, but left three years ago to take a job – out of the ski industry – in southern Idaho. “That was one of the small reasons I didn’t want to stay. I knew (Rhodes) was going to push that.”
Rumbaugh recalls one occasion when he made the decision to stop the lifts and close the mountain, angering Rhodes. High winds can cause the gondolas to swing and smash into the towers.
“I shut down the mountain myself. He was pretty mad at me,” Rumbaugh said. “But I felt it was the right decision.”
Before Rumbaugh left Silver Mountain, he said he made detailed notes of the maintenance that needed to be done on the gondolas and towers. Rumbaugh said he was not qualified to discuss specifics on Pipkin’s allegations, but that he has heard reports of a backlog from other former coworkers and friends at the resort.
“You need to stay on top of it to stay legal,” Rumbaugh said. “But I was told almost none of that had been done. … If something’s left in good shape you can get by for about two years. Then it starts snowballing on you.”
According to Doppelmayr, the Swiss-based company that supplies replacement parts for Silver Mountain’s gondola, the resort has not been cutting back on its orders. Doppelmayr purchased VonRoll in 1996 and is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of aerial tramways. Mark Bee, vice president of Doppelmayr’s operations in the United States, said Silver Mountain has been “if anything, the opposite of penny pinchers … I would be shocked if they would do anything but by the book.”
Bee also said that tramway inspections by insurance company inspectors are not known for being sloppy. “They’re carrying the liability,” he explained.
A three-sentence statement issued Tuesday from Silver Mountain’s insurer, Willis of New Hampshire, stated no deficiencies were found in recent surveys at the mountain. Pipkin said he was present during the surveys and said he never saw inspectors going through the maintenance records he kept.