“I thought the whole mountain would stop, but people kept on skiing,” she said.
Nineteen-year-old Kaitlyn Dingley arrived at the scene of the incident minutes before Sugarloaf’s ski patrol, although she didn’t see it happen.
Dingley, a 2009 graduate of Carrabassett Valley Academy, a high school associated with Sugarloaf that centers around skiing, was on her way down the slopes when “people told me not to go [that way] because something horrible happened.”
She arrived to see people lying on the ground where their chairs had plummeted, while people in the still-suspended chairs looked on, horrified that they might be next.
“We didn’t let any of [the injured people] move. They all had back pain, so we wanted to get them to the hospital for X-rays," she said in a telephone interview.
Dingley, a nursing student at Husson College in Bangor, Maine, said she had never seen anything like this incident. “A few years ago, one of the chairs slid back into another, but I’ve definitely never seen anything like that before,” she said. “It was just really shocking to come up on.”
Eighteen-year-old Ben Simms, a senior at Harriton Senior High School in Rosemont, Pa., was on the lift when a chair above him derailed.
“I was on the lift with someone who works at Sugarloaf. [The chair] bounced up and down, and [the employee] said that a car might have derailed.”
It was the beginning of an almost two-hour ordeal, in which Simms sat on the lift, freezing and waiting for rescue.
“They rescue people depending on where on the lift was the coldest,” which is higher up, Simms said in a telephone interview, explaining that his chair was near the fourth tower.
Rescuers finally came. Simms attached himself to a pulley system that gradually lowered him to the ground.
Simms, who learned to ski at Sugarloaf starting at age 2, said nothing like this has ever happened to him.
“Chairlifts stop a lot,” he said, adding that it had stopped once before the derailment. “But after the second time it stopped and my chair bounced, [I knew] something was wrong.”
The two-passenger lift was manufactured and installed in 1975 and modified in 1983. It carries 162 chairs, each weighing 140 pounds. The lift is powered by a 250-horsepower motor. It is inspected daily and receives weekly, monthly, and yearly maintenance and testing, as well as an annual inspection by the Maine Board of Elevator and Tramway Safety, the resort said.
The Carrabassett Valley resort said it was concerned for those involved and expressed gratitude to safety personnel who responded.
"Sugarloaf Mountain is absolutely committed to the safety of its guests and employees," the resort said.
