A full triple chair slid into another chair carrying three people at Ski Santa Fe, New Mexico Saturday, leading to a partial rope evacuation of the Tesuque Peak lift. No injuries were reported and the lift was taken out of service. “Ski Santa Fe experienced a mechanical issue on the Tesuque Peak triple chair, resulting in a prolonged stoppage of the lift,” the resort posted to social media. “Patrol crews responded quickly to evacuate the affected chairs and all other riders were unloaded from the lift.”
General Manager Ben Abruzzo told the Santa Fe New Mexican an investigation revealed the affected chair had been removed over the summer for nondestructive testing and incorrectly reinstalled. A subsequent pull test on the grip did not catch the mistake.
Tesuque Peak is a 1983 Doppelmayr fixed grip triple with 163 chairs. Over the past few days workers removed and re-checked the 20 percent of chairs that were removed last summer and completed a visual inspection on the rest of the lift, which is expected to reopen tomorrow at 11:00 am.
Lift Blog 
yeahhhh……. nope not going to schedule my vacation there. My home ski area had this problem. next the bull wheel bearing failed. they finally sold the are to a real estate developer.
to his credit he dumped and 60 million in to the area. things are not broken now.
Os there someone ready to dump 69 million into ski Santa Fe?
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They just got a new LIft maintenance manager,hes is definitely having a tough first week.
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I didn’t see anything about the countermeasure to prevent this incident from happening again. The countermeasure should come from the root cause analysis…which wasn’t included either.
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The article states that the crew removed and rechecked the 20% group. I would bet there was a thorough reading of the procedure before this happened, so that the person or persons who did the project over the summer understand what went wrong and how to do properly so it doesn’t happen again.
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Sounds like a guess as to what will be done (read the instructions better) to prevent this from happening again. I would not ride any lifts at Ski Santa Fe if they’re not able to provide the root cause and countermeasure.
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Not a guess. I’ve rebuilt and relocated thousands of grips, and if that were to happen at my place that’s how we would approach it. Techs who were not involved in the original project would do the re-inspection to ensure a different set of eyes looked at everything. Santa Fe operates under the same rules as we do.
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Sounds like the carrier that slid back was in the 20% NDT lot that was removed preseason. A minimum of 20% of the grips are required to be removed, visually inspected and NDT tested annually.
Once the grips are reinstalled on the haulrope and tightened to the manufactures specifications. Then the grips are required to be slip tested. A force applied to the grip 3 times what the actual grip would slip at, in the steepest location.
So likely the grip was not slip tested properly or the lock nut that holds the grip spring tension was not tight??
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I would say the lock nut was not torqued to the proper tension. It is also common for the ski area to spray paint (color coded for each year) at each grip removed and put back on to give a quick visual if any are slipping even a little bit. You can often see it on the haul rope if you look up. If the bolts loosened later it can allow it slip back.
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If only someone would report on the fact that earlier that same day a family actually reported the exact chair that slipped was lurching and almost threw three children off. It was reported to ski patrol and nothing was done. Moreover Ski Santa Fe is deleting social media comments about this report.
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Thanks for mentioning this! Was going to post this as well, the problem is not so much the mechanical failure but the lack of response as well as cover up to the original complaint!
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I ski SSF regularly. I was there the day this happened and the day after. Management was very serious about reputational damage for an honest mistake. I wouldn’t look down upon them for a nowadays normal attempt to minimize bad PR. They genuinely care about providing excellent skiing at an affordable price. This mountain is underrated.
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The internet is not the place for reason. Where is yer pitchfork?!
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