Video from avalanche hitting a chairlift

vauban08

Member
i was on that lift yesterday morning before the avalanche came down. scary as fuck, i was soooo glad the rope didn't snap :/ this could have ended so much worse...

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around two minutes of second video

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jeeze thats a hugggggeee avy, and in bounds right near a lift, yikes.
 
According to French media, the slide was caused by warm weather. The water under the glacier destabilises the snow, causing an avalanche. But that was pretty fucked up. I wonder why they did not stop the tow before catastrophic failure
 
Thats pretty ridiculous. First video is scary as hell, and I'm amazed the chair kept chugging along in the second one...
 
call me an asshole but those retards should have stopped that lift from operating a long time before it even reached the lifts.. maybe its just me and I'm an asshole for saying that but FUCK are you fucking retarded?
 
Holy shit thats scary.

Would the cable have sagged/slackened when the tower at the bottom got taken out?
 
I dont understand french can somebody translate it/ give a genreal idea of what they are saying. was this skier triggered or just a case of the bonding in the snow not holding due to increasing spring like weather?
 
the latter.

The reason they didn't stop the lift immediately is quite simple: get as many people as possible safely to the top instead of just waiting for the snow to fuck up the pillars.
 
what it looks like is that as soon as it started sliding they stopped letting people on the lift but kept the lift going to get the people on it as far away from danger as possible. Smartest thing they could have done. It wasn't moving fast, but there still couldn't have been more than a couple minutes warning.
 
I understand that. But it was to perfect to not post that picture. Like the guys voice is exactly what I would think of when I see this picture.
 
cables are very stretchy, I bet one of the lift cables can add on 5% of it length before snapping. over the whole lift line that's quite a bit, so it would take a hell of a lot to snap that.

I'm also guessing they had breaks that the put on a the top once it stopped moving
 
I was pretty surprised too. The really gnarly part is in the first video when you can see the cross beam popping off the individual towers.
 
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